Meet Our New Leadership: ARPA-I Welcomes Dr. Vincent Tang
Dr. Vincent Tang is the deputy director of ARPA-I and performing the duties of the director to establish the agency. Dr. Tang comes from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), where he was most recently the principal deputy director of the National Ignition Facility and Photon Science Directorate. In this role he was part of the senior management team overseeing and supporting efforts to produce transformational capabilities and results for DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and US national security, including the historic achievement of fusion ignition on the NIF for NNSA's Stockpile Stewardship Program. Tang supported the establishment of LLNL’s inertial fusion energy initiative to build on ignition for energy applications, including formulating public-private partnerships to support DOE’s decadal vision for accelerating fusion commercialization. Tang was also a member of DoD’s Defense Science Board from 2022-2024, and co-chair of its subcommittee on threat reduction.
During 2013 to 2019, Tang was a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he created and led the agency’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (C-WMD) initiatives, SIGMA and SIGMA+, centered on developing scalable, automated, and distributed sensor networks combined with automated intelligence analytics and insights from social science to detect the full spectrum of Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosives (CBRNE) threats at the city-to-region scale. Partnering with multiple international, federal, and state and local government entities as well as the private sector, SIGMA/SIGMA+ was successfully operationalized in multiple regions. Tang also created and led DARPA’s Intense and Compact Neutron Sources (ICONS) program as well as the Accelerated Computation for Efficient Scientific Simulation (ACCESS) program. He was named DARPA’s Program Manager of the Year in 2016, was a finalist for the 2017 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal, and was awarded DARPA’s Superior Public Service Medal in 2019.
Dr. Tang began his career at LLNL in 2006, leading and developing multiple efforts in compact accelerators, pulsed-plasma radiation sources, and associated non-destructive evaluation and national security applications. He earned a dual B.S. in nuclear and chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and studied fusion to earn a S.M. in nuclear engineering and a Ph.D. in applied plasma physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.