Vincent Ialenti is a Social Scientist in the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy. He leads DOE’s Consent-Based Siting Consortia: twelve project teams - drawn from academia, nonprofits, and the private sector - awarded $24m to facilitate public engagement and build community capacity for siting one or more federal consolidated interim storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel.

 Prior to his federal service, Vincent was MacArthur Assistant Research Professor at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. He has held fellowships at University of Southern California, University of British Columbia, and Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities.

Vincent’s research explores matters of planetary environmental security, nuclear waste expert culture, organizational planning temporalities, and military-industrial accident causation. His book Deep Time Reckoning (MIT Press, 2020) examines how Finland’s spent nuclear fuel repository safety case experts pondered the limits of knowledge and grappled with 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 Geosciences, Cambridge University Press, MIT Press, and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. His work has been featured by the BBC, Scientific American, NPR, Science, Forbes, Psyche, Public Radio International, ABC Radio Australia, and other outlets.