Viacheslav Li earned his PhD in physics from the University of Hawai`i, where he worked with John Learned on the miniTimeCube experiment, developing and deploying the first boron-loaded plastic-scintillator detector with fast-timing electronics and high spatial resolution for antineutrino detection at the NIST research reactor. Following his doctoral studies, he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2018 as a postdoctoral researcher in the Rare Event Detection Group. At LLNL, he contributed to the development of the Segmented AntiNeutrino Directional Detector, a novel Li6-doped plastic-scintillator array for reactor monitoring, and contributed to the WATCHMAN project, a gadolinium-doped water Cherenkov detector for remote reactor monitoring at the Boulby mine in the UK.

Currently, Viacheslav is a staff scientist at LLNL, where his research focuses on advanced photodetector systems, monolithic and segmented antineutrino detectors, scalable water Cherenkov instrumentation, and algorithms for directional sensitivity. His work supports non-intrusive reactor monitoring and nuclear nonproliferation initiatives, with recent publications covering large-area picosecond photodetectors, lithium-loaded scintillator materials, and compact data acquisition systems for neutron and gamma-ray detection.

Viacheslav’s research interests include neutrino and neutron detector development, photodetector technologies, data acquisition and analysis methods, and applications of radiation detection for nuclear security and reactor monitoring.

PhD, Physics, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2018

Grad Student, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, 2008–2011

Specialist/MS, Physics, Irkutsk State University, 2008

S. A. Dazeley, et al., A monolithic antineutrino detector for non-intrusive reactor monitoring, Nucl. Instrum. Methods, A (2025) 170915.

O. Benevides Rodrigues, et al., A prototype reactor-antineutrino detector based on Li-doped pulse-shaping-discriminating plastic scintillator. arXiv:2505.05696.

G. Yepez, et al., Algorithm to extract direction in 2D discrete distributions and a continuous Frobenius norm, arXiv:2506.17360.

M.J. Duvall, et al., Directional response of several geometries for reactor-neutrino detectors, Physical Review Applied 22 (2024) 054030. arXiv:2402.01636.

C. Roca, et al. Performance of large-scale 6Li-doped pulse-shape discriminating plastic scintillators, Nucl. Instrum. Methods, A 1069 (2024) 169916.

V.A. Li, et al., Evaluation of a positron-emission-tomography-based SiPM readout for compact segmented neutron imagers, Nucl. Instrum. Methods, A 1046 (2023) 167624. arXiv:2202.07759.

V.A. Li, S.A. Dazeley, M. Bergevin, A. Bernstein, Scalability of gadolinium-doped-water Cherenkov detectors for nuclear nonproliferation, Physical Review Applied 18 (2022) 034059. arXiv:2204.08618.

V.A. Li, et al., SANDD: A highly-segmented pulse-shape-sensitive plastic scintillator detector incorporating silicon photomultiplier arrays. Nucl. Instrum. Methods, A 942 (2019) 162334, arXiv:1903.11668.

G.R. Jocher et al., miniTimeCube as a Neutron Scatter Camera, AIP Advances 9, 035301 (2019), arXiv:1903.01848.

V.A. Li, et al., Studies of MCP-PMTs in the mTC neutrino detector, AIP Advances 8, 095003 (2018), arXiv:1809.08314.

V.A. Li, miniTimeCube: Building The World’s Smallest Neutrino Detector (PhD thesis, 2018) INSPIRE record 1666321.

V.A. Li, et al., Invited article: miniTimeCube, Review of Scientific Instruments 87, 021301 (2016), arXiv:1602.01405.

C. Lane et al., A new type of Neutrino Detector for Sterile Neutrino Search at Nuclear Reactors and Nuclear Nonproliferation Applications, arXiv:1501.06935.

• PLS NACS Division Spot Award (2025)
• LLNL Tranformation Award (2024)
• PLS Directorate Award (2024)
• GS Silver Award (2023)
• CGSR Short-Term Fellowship (2023)
• University of Hawai‘i Outstanding Physics Teaching Assistant Prize (2013)