Degree: Ph.D. from Imperial College London
Research: Laboratory Plasma Astrophysics
Joined LLNL: August 2025
Research at LLNL: Vicente combines theory and experiments on pulsed-power and laser-driven platforms as quantitative testbeds for fundamental astrophysical processes. His work primarily focuses on anomalous angular momentum transport in magnetized rotating plasma flows, with applications to accretion discs in the universe. His research portfolio encompasses many topics, including collisionless shocks, magnetic reconnection, and plasma jets.
Bio: Vicente Valenzuela Villaseca is a Lawrence Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the National Ignition Facility and Photon Science Directorate and a visiting researcher at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Before joining LLNL, Vicente was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Astrophysics at Princeton University. He earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physics from Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, and Ph.D. in Plasma Physics from Imperial College London where he pioneered platforms to study accretion-disc-physics in the laboratory.
Joined the NIF&PS Directorate in 2025