Our strategic projects manager, Anupam Kumar Pilli, just returned from an insightful week in Nashville attending the 2025 Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference IEEE NSREC (NSREC)—the world’s leading forum on radiation effects in electronics and photonic systems.

Representing the ANU Heavy Ion Accelerators and our newly commissioned Space Irradiation Beamline (SIBL), he had the opportunity to engage with global leaders across aerospace, defence, semiconductor, and radiation assurance sectors. The conversations reaffirmed two key realities:
There is a global bottleneck in accessible, LET-calibrated radiation testing—a challenge Australia is now uniquely positioned to address through HIAF-SIBL.

Rad-tolerant and rad-hardened component markets are expanding rapidly, driven by emerging demands in New-Space ecosystem, AI-on-orbit, autonomous systems, and medtech.

Our presence at IEEE NSREC was enabled through the Australian Government's Global Science and Technology Diplomacy Fund (GSTDF) and in partnership with Zero-Error Systems (ZES) Pte Ltd (ZES), with whom we’re building next-generation rad-tolerant test protocols and a regional COTS qualification pathway.

At the ANU Institute for Space | InSpace, we are also advancing a national effort to scale this momentum into the Future of Space Cooperative Research Centre (CRC), with a vision to build sovereign capability in space qualification, advanced semiconductor design, and cross-sector radiation assurance.

For Anupam, "It was great to be at NSREC and to see ANU and Australia step into the global conversation—not just as participants, but as strategic contributors to resilient space and technology supply chains."