Andrew McIlroy has become associate laboratories director for the Sandia National Laboratories California campus in Livermore, Calif., the New Mexico-based laboratory system said Wednesday.
McIlroy now will lead the smaller, satellite campus of the main U.S. nuclear-weapon engineering laboratory, which employs about 1,000 people. Among other things, the campus includes the combustion research facility that studies conventional chemical explosions. McIlroy began his Sandia career there in 1991 as a postdoctoral researcher, Sandia said.
McIlroy was most recently director of the Energy and Homeland Security Program Management Center.
McIlroy replaces Dori Ellis, who in June became deputy director for the whole Sandia system. Ellis could become Sandia’s acting director after current director Stephen Younger retires on Dec. 31.
The Honeywell-owned National Engineering and Technology Solutions of Sandia manages the Sandia National Laboratories under a 10-year National Nuclear Security Administration contract awarded in 2016 and worth about $25 billion, including options. The company is in the second year of the contract’s five-year base period.
Sandia designs the non-nuclear parts of nuclear weapons, and annually certifies that the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal will perform as expected. That means that weapons will always detonate if needed and never detonate when not required. The lab also performs some buzz-worthy destructive tests on weapons components, including launching mock weapons components into solid walls using rocket-powered sleds.
Sandia’s main campus is in Albuquerque, N.M. All told, the Sandia system employs about 11,500 people. Besides Albuquerque and the main satellite campus in California, the lab also has a presence at the Nevada National Security Site, where the DOE does non-nuclear-explosive plutonium tests, and Kauai in Hawaii, where Sandia tests weapons components aboard atmospheric sounding rockets.
