PhD candidate
Predictive modeling of radionuclide behavior in the subsurface with Prof. Haruko Wainwright
dauren@mit.edu
(he/him)
Dauren is a graduate student specializing in nuclear waste management. He gained practical experience at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), where he conducted numerical simulations to evaluate the long-term behavior of nuclear waste repositories. His work focused on understanding the coupled thermal–hydrological–chemical processes within engineered barrier systems over millennia.
Currently at MIT, Dauren is exploring ways to harness untapped energy from high-level nuclear waste. Another major focus of his research is modeling anion exclusion in clay-rich geological media—one of the key phenomena influencing the transport of long-lived, highly mobile activation and fission products such as Cl-36, I-129, and Se-79.
He can be found at Hayden library on any random day and night (and early morning) hour, usually deep in reactive transport models and sustained by caffeine and unpredictable sleep schedules.