James Peery will become director of the Sandia National Laboratories on Jan. 1, after current director Stephen Younger retires, the multistate Department of Energy nuclear-weapon-engineering lab announced this week.
Peery is now associate laboratory director of national security sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn. In that role, he succeeded Brent Park, who became Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at National Nuclear Security Administration headquarters in Washington last year.
The board of Sandia management and operations prime National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia — a Honeywell subsidiary — unanimously selected Peery, according to a Monday press release.
Peery joined the Oak Ridge lab in 2017 after serving in various roles at Sandia and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, both based in northern New Mexico, according to his Oak Ridge bio. He spent most of the 1990s at Sandia before shuttling between the two labs in the early 2000s. Peery started his career working in high energy physics after earning a doctorate in nuclear engineering from Texas A&M University.
Sandia designs the non-nuclear parts of nuclear weapons, and certifies each year that the U.S. nuclear arsenal can perform as designed. The lab also maintains the Z machine high-energy density physics facility. The laboratory had a roughly $3.5 billion budget in 2018. About 70% of its funding comes from the Department of Energy, with the Department of Defense providing the remaining 30%.
Sandia employs about 11,500 contractors and federal workers, most of whom are located at the lab’s main campus in Albuquerque. Others are located at the lab’s smaller satellite campus near the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., outside the San Francisco Bay area. Sandia also operates the Tonopah Test Range for the National Nuclear Security Administration at the Air Force’s Nellis Range in Nevada, and the Kauai Test Facility in Kauai, Hawaii, which tests missile systems aboard suborbital rockets.
Younger served as Sandia director starting in May 2017, as National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia assumed management of the lab.
