Vincent Ialenti, Research Associate

Vincent Ialenti is an anthropologist who studies how nuclear energy and weapons waste organizations reckon with deep time, build governance architectures, and sustain continuity into uncertain futures. During the Biden Administration, he served as a Senior Program Manager in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, where he led the Consent-Based Siting Consortia: a $24 million program supporting twelve project teams drawn from academia, nonprofits, and the private sector to advance public engagement and build community capacity for siting spent nuclear fuel facilities.

Ialenti is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Tampere University in Finland. He serves on the Advisory Board for Linköping University’s Swedish Research Council project “Managing Eternity? Accountability in the Deep Time Management of Nuclear Waste” and on the Management Committee of the European Union COST Action “Terra Atomica: Exploring the Afterlives of Nuclear Landscapes in Europe.”

Ialenti’s first 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. He 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. In January 2027, MIT Press will publish Ialenti’s second book, Longstorming: Beyond the Age of Haste.

Prior to his federal service, Ialenti was MacArthur Assistant Research Professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He has held fellowships at the University of Southern California, the University of British Columbia, and Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. His work has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, N Square Collaborative, and the Berggruen Institute. He holds a PhD from Cornell University and an MSc from the London School of Economics.

Ialenti has published with MIT Press, American Ethnologist, Social Studies of Science, Physics Today, Nuclear Technology, Science & Technology Studies, the 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, Atlas Obscura, Psyche, Public Radio International, ABC Radio Australia, and other outlets.