Katherine Banks is officially in as the president of the Texas A&M University System, the university’s board of regents said this week.
The regents formally confirmed Banks for the job Wednesday. The current vice chancellor of engineering and national laboratories, Banks’s rise to the top was foreordained earlier this year when the regents announced her as the only candidate for president.
Mona Dreicer, who retired in 2020 as the deputy director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Center for Global Security Research, received the Administrator’s Distinguished Service Gold Award from the National Nuclear Security Administration, the lab said.
Dreicer’s most recent stint at Livermore started in 2003.
The Government Accountability Office shot down a bid protest from a small business that missed out, by around $100,000, on a security contract for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Albuquerque site.
Losing bidder ISS Action, Jamaica, NY., one of seven small businesses that bucked for the work, protested the award to locals Montech Inc., Albuquerque, claiming that Montech’s program manager lacked the five years minimum experience that the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) solicitation required for the position.
But the Government Accountability Office said that not only did the winner’s program manager have the requisite experience, but that ISS would not have been competitively disadvantaged if the Montech manager lacked the experience and got a waiver from the NNSA excusing that hypothetical shortfall.
Montech bid $12.5 million for the work while ISS bid $12.6 million, according to the Government Accountability Office’s March 19 decision about the protest. NNSA selected the cheapest, technically qualified proposal. The contract has a one year base with four one-year options and an extension of services option for six months.
For now, Montech is staying on the job, although the Small Business Administration is separately investigating a protest about whether the winner was actually a small enough business to compete for the contract.
NNSA’s Albuquerque office is located on Kirtland Air Force Base near the Sandia National Labs. The Albuquerque office is essentially the western branch of NNSA headquarters and houses some 1,200 staff.
