The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management appointed Michael Mikolanis to lead its Los Alamos National Laboratory field office in New Mexico, a DOE advisory board learned Wednesday.
The Mikolanis appointment was announced to the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board by Lee Bishop, DOE’s deputy designated federal officer, during a virtual meeting.
Mikolanis, who has more than 30 years of engineering and management experience with the federal government and private industry, has been assistant manager for nuclear material stabilization Environmental Management’s operations office at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina since 2017, according to an online biography.
The new Environmental Management field office chief will start at Los Alamos on Aug. 15, taking over from the deputy manager, Stephen Hoffman, who has been the acting boss since June 28 following Kirk Lachman’s retirement.
Meanwhile DOE’s state regulator, the New Mexico Environment Department, is moving away from telecommuting and toward more traditional in-person staffing next month. “We will be back in the office by Aug. 9th,” Chris Catechis, acting director of the state agency’s Resource Protection Division, told the panel during Wednesday’s meeting.
