The Joe Biden administration will nominate Texas A&M nuclear engineering professor Marvin Adams to be deputy administrator for defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, the White House announced Wednesday.
Adams, if approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee and confirmed by the full Senate, will replace Charlie Verdon, the last senior appointee left from the Donald Trump administration.
As of Thursday morning in the log-jammed Senate, which is juggling multiple legislative priorities tied to Biden’s domestic agenda and a long list of nominees for other senior government positions, the Armed Services committee had not scheduled a nomination hearing for Adams.
After earning his PhD, Adams did some of his first work in the nuclear-weapons complex at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. He has since consulted for all three nuclear weapons laboratories, including the other nuclear-weapons design lab, Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Today, Texas A&M University is a non-managing partner on the site operations contractor for Livermore and a partner on Triad National Security, the operations partner at Los Alamos. Adams is a board observer at Triad.
Adams has a PhD and a masters degree in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan, according to his scholar profile at A&M.
