Vincent
Ialenti

MacArthur Nuclear Waste Solutions Fellow, George Washington University

Vincent holds a PhD in anthropology from Cornell University and an MSc in law, anthropology, and society from the London School of Economics. His first ethnographic project explored how Finland’s nuclear waste disposal experts grappled with deep time, death, and the limits of imagination when developing what will, in the 2020s, likely become the world’s first operational high-level nuclear waste repository. He is now developing a second ethnographic project exploring lessons learned from the 2014 waste drum breach accident at the US defense nuclear waste repository WIPP. Vincent has been a US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow (2011-2016) and a Mellon Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities (2015-2016). Alongside his academic publications, Vincent has written articles for NPR, Forbes, Physics Today, Nautilus, and other outlets. His writings have been covered by Huffington Post, Forbes, Nevada Public Radio, Les Affaires, and the Long Now Foundation.

I’m most excited to work on projects that… cultivate my abilities to tell nuclear stories in written formats.

I’m looking for partners that can help me… co-author articles about nuclear expert life and place them in popular online or print media outlets.

A moment when I felt most inspired in my work was… when I became the first anthropologist with a feature article in Physics Today, the flagship publication of the American Institute of Physics.

Innovations in my field I’m most excited to work on… involve strategies to make nuclear issues more salient among younger generations of STEM experts.

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