Tyler Dant Email and Phone Number

Mr. Dant joined ARA in November 2012 as a Health Physicist/Nuclear Engineer and is currently assistant group leader of the Operations and Analytic Technologies (OAT) group in ARA’s Arlington Division. He specializes in the development of consequence assessment models that simulate the physical and biological effects of ionizing radiation and other phenomenology associated with nuclear and radiological weapons for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). Mr. Dant is currently the principal investigator on the Nuclear Detonation Human Survivability and Modeling (NDHSM) with DTRA. The primary focus of this work is to leverage the continuing improvement of biological models in DTRA’s Health Effects from Nuclear and Radiological Environments (HENRE) software to improve the detailed NUDET casualty assessments being requested by DTRA and the rest of the DoD. In addition to supporting HENRE development, Mr. Dant is critical to model development relative to a wide range of effects associated with nuclear events. In 2017, Mr. Dant was the lead in the development of updated radiological fallout protection factors for a large suite of buildings for inclusion in DTRA’s Hazard Prediction & Assessment Capability (HPAC) model. This effort was a major overhaul of existing DoD building protection factors used to estimate consequence assessment expanding the number of different building types from five to ninety-five. Furthermore, the protection factor assumptions were improved by utilizing a population-based cell-average protection factor instead of a single building type for an entire grid cell and allowed a user-defined percentage of outdoor and indoor population in a single analysis.Similarly, Mr. Dant has supported a NATO exercise on simulating a mass radiological casualty event to test rapid evaluation of clinical signs and symptoms leveraged his experience to develop the Automated Radiation Triage (ART) model, an R Shiny application designed to ascertain whether an exposed individual would experience acute radiation syndrome (ARS). He has developed a model to predict the time-dependent dose associated with the deposition of radioactive material in the fallout plume onto skin following the detonation of a nuclear device. This model used the ORIGEN code to simulate a nuclear detonation (i.e., defining the source term), and HPAC to simulate the transport of radiation in the atmosphere. Additionally, Mr. Dant is a certified CBRNE Decision Support Trainer that has instructed courses focusing on HPAC, IWMDT-CA, JEM, and GACA.