Aditi Verma

Biography

Aditi Verma is an assistant professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She is broadly interested in how nuclear technologies specifically and complex technologies broadly—and their institutional infrastructures—can be designed in collaboration with publics such that traditionally excluded perspectives can be brought into these design processes.

Prior to her current appointment, Aditi worked as a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Belfer Center’s Project on Managing the Atom and the International Security Program. She also served at the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency where her work, endorsed and funded by policymakers from the NEA member countries, focused on bringing epistemologies from the humanities and social sciences to academic and practitioner nuclear engineering, thus broadening their epistemic core.

Aditi holds undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Nuclear Science and Engineering from MIT. Her doctoral research, funded by the Sloan Foundation and a Spira Fellowship, combined theoretical and methodological resources from design studies and sociology to study how reactor designers make decisions in the foundational early stages of design, particularly those bearing on safety. Aditi has also previously held positions at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Framatome (formerly Areva), and the Center for the Study of Science, Technology and Policy.