Vahid Majidi, a former Pentagon and national-lab hand who most recently worked in industry, is scheduled today to replace the departing Terry Michalske as director of the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina.
Majidi will be executive vice president at Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), which runs the lab and the Savannah River Site’s non-liquid-waste-cleanup mission for the Department of Energy. The contractor is in the final four-and-a-half months of a 10-year management pact awarded by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management in 2008, and which is worth nearly $9.5 billion, with options.
Majidi comes to Savannah River from Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies of Greenbelt, Md., where he was senior vice president for strategic initiatives. Stinger Ghaffarian, a high-tech engineering services contractor, is due by the end of March to be acquired by engineering and construction firm KBR of Houston.
Majidi has been in and out of government since the late 1990s, including stints at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the FBI, and, more recently, the Defense Department, where he was deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear matters from 2013 to 2017.
Michalske, meanwhile, is leaving “to pursue other interests,” a spokesperson for Savannah River Nuclear Solutions said by email. Michalske had been director of Savannah River National Laboratory since 2010, two years after SRNS took on the site management contract. Among his previous experience in the DOE complex, Michalske was director of energy and security systems at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.
Among other missions, the Savannah River National Laboratory develops technology and methods for cleaning up nuclear waste left over from the Cold War arms race. The lab is known colloquially as the agency’s Environmental Management laboratory.
