David Vaniman

Professional History

Dr. Vaniman received his PhD in Earth Sciences in 1976 from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Prior to graduate school, he had experience teaching high school in Nigeria and was a member of the Geological Survey of Nigeria. After working as a post-doctoral research associate at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, he was employed in 1979 as a Staff Member in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Division of Los Alamos National Laboratory. He joined the permanent science staff of PSI in 2011. One of his projects at LANL was to lead the mineralogy-petrology research group for the Yucca Mountain Project (investigation of a potential high-level nuclear waste repository in Nevada), 1981-1988. He is participating on two instrument teams for Mars Science Laboratory, which landed on Mars in August 2012. He is Deputy PI for the CheMin combined X-ray diffraction and fluorescence instrument and has been a Co-I on the ChemCam laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy and imaging instrument.