Environmental historian who traced Chernobyl's concealed death toll
"Ignorance about low-dose exposure is, I have argued, partly deliberate."
MIT historian of science and environment whose decade of archival work across Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus redefined the study of nuclear landscapes. Her Plutopia (2013) exposed the parallel plutonium disasters at Hanford and Mayak: the only book to win top scholarly prizes across Russian, U.S., and environmental history. And her National Book Critics Circle finalist Manual for Survival (2019) argued that the IAEA and Chernobyl Forum excluded internal exposure from contaminated food, suppressing evidence of tens of thousands of deaths. That critique has become the central historiographical challenge to the international consensus, opening a reckoning with how Cold War nuclear institutions shaped the science of low-dose radiation itself.
Career Timeline
- 2000Joined the faculty at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)
- 2004Published A Biography of No Place, won AHA George Louis Beer Prize
- 2013Published Plutopia, swept top scholarly prizes in Russian, U.S., and environmental history
- 2015Published Dispatches from Dystopia; awarded Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellowships
- 2018Appointed Professor of Science, Technology and Society at MIT
- 2019Published Manual for Survival, NBCC finalist and won ASEEES Zelnik and Shulman Prizes
- 2026Published Tiny Gardens Everywhere