Vincent Ialenti, Research Associate

Vincent Ialenti is a cultural anthropologist who studies how nuclear organizations implement safety protocols, engage with publics, and extend risk governance rubrics across generations and into deep time. During the Biden Administration, he served in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Spent Fuel and High-Level Waste Disposition as Federal Manager for DOE’s Consent-Based Siting Consortia: twelve interdisciplinary project teams drawn from academia, nonprofits, and the private sector awarded $24 million to strengthen civic capacity and mutual learning about spent fuel management.
 

Prior to his federal service, he was MacArthur Assistant Research Professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and held fellowships at University of Southern California, University of British Columbia, and Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities. Vincent's book Deep Time Reckoning (MIT Press, 2020) examines how Finland’s spent nuclear fuel repository safety case experts pondered the limits of knowledge as they modeled distant future societies, bodies, and ecosystems. Vincent has also conducted a multi-year ethnographic study examining the technopolitical, financial, and temporal drivers behind U.S. transuranic nuclear weapons waste drum breach accidents. His research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, N Square Collaborative, and The Berggruen Institute. 

Vincent has published with American Ethnologist, Social Studies of Science, Physics Today, Nuclear Technology, Science & Technology Studies, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Nature Geoscience, and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. His work has been featured by the BBC, Scientific American, NPR, Science, Forbes, Wired Japan, ABC Radio Australia, and other outlets. Vincent holds a PhD from Cornell University and a MSc from the London School of Economics.