Prof. R. Scott Kemp

Bio

Scott Kemp is assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, and director of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy.  From 2010-2011, he served at the State Department as science advisor in the Office of the Special Advisor for Nonproliferation and Arms Control where he worked on negotiations with Iran and was a principal author of the U.S. technical negotiating strategy. Kemp received his Ph.D. from Princeton University on gas-centrifuge proliferation, and a bachelor’s in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research combines physics, nuclear engineering, and history to identify the limits and policy options for achieving international security under technical constraints. For the CVT he is developing a new method to validate the authenticity of nuclear warheads using a zero-knowledge implementation of nuclear resonance fluorescence.