Incoming Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Director Terry Wallace plans a wave of personnel changes, including elevating an associate director to the No. 4 post at the Department of Energy facility in New Mexico, a spokesperson said this week.
Carolyn Zerkle will be promoted to executive director at LANL effective Jan. 1. The executive director “leads institutional initiatives and provides oversight for Lab organizations such as the Prime Contract Office, Chief Financial Officer, and Ethics & Audits Office,” according to LANL’s website.
Zerkle is now associate director for business innovation in LANL’s Operations and Business Directorate: a position several rungs below the executive director on the lab’s organization chart. She will replace Dave Lyons, who has been executive director since April 2016.
Lyons, who previously spent eight years in LANL’s Washington, D.C., office, will leave the office of the lab director and return to the weapons physics division as a deputy director for the U.S./U.K. program office.
Both changes would take effect on the day Wallace is set to replace Charles McMillan as director of LANL and president of Los Alamos National Security: the university-industry coalition that runs the lab for DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
Meanwhile, another personnel switch already happened. On Dec. 4, Nancy Jo Nicholas replaced Wallace as LANL’s principal associate director for global security. Nicholas will also continue in her old role as associate director for threat identification and response until Jan. 1.
All of these changes will likely be short-lived, with Los Alamos National Security’s contract set to expire on Sept. 30, 2018.
In 2014, the lab was held responsible for a radiation leak at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., and the department decided not to renew the company’s contract. The agency plans to award a new LANL management contract in April or May. Just this week, DOE announced that a Stoller Newport News Nuclear-BWX Technologies team would take over lab legacy cleanup work now managed by Los Alamos National Security.
Los Alamos National Security encompasses longtime LANL manager the University of California, plus senior industry partner Bechtel National and industry teammates AECOM and BWXT.
