Government conferences can rarely boast of a speech by a well-known actor featured in Home Box Office’s series, including ‘The Wire’ — except maybe when the actor has a brother who is a Department of Energy manager.
The DOE Small Business Forum & Expo last week in New Orleans included a keynote address from actor Wendell Pierce, perhaps best known for portraying Detective Bunk Moreland in the HBO series, The Wire. The actor also happens to be the brother of DOE’s Ron Pierce. Ron Pierce, who heads the Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization, which put together the conference.
The actor, who last year starred in a Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman,” received a standing ovation following a talk that touched on revitalization efforts in his native New Orleans and opportunities available to entrepreneurs and small businesses, according to a contractor who attended last week’s gathering.Wendell Pierce also expressed pride in his brother Ron, a U.S. Army combat veteran who graduated from West Point and has worked in government, politics and consulting.
Responses to the Department of Energy’s request for information on technical support services for former gaseous diffusion plants in Kentucky and Ohio are due by Aug. 3, the agency said last week.
DOE formally issued the request for information notice online July 13 for the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, the Paducah Site in Kentucky and the Lexington, Ky.,-based project office serving both properties. The DOE Office of Environmental Management said a few days earlier it would soon start its market research for a follow-on contract to the one held by a branch of Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based Pro2Serve. The $179-million contract held by Pro2Serve’s Enterprise Technical Assistance Services is scheduled to run through March of 2025.
Comments should be emailed by 3 p.m. Eastern Time on Aug. 3 to contracting officer Lori Sehlhorst at [email protected].
The Department of Energy’s Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina has chosen Daren Timmons, Ph.D., as director of industrial and strategic partnerships, a job that will focus on strengthening ties between the lab, nuclear industry and non-academic entities, according to a Wednesday press release.
Timmons joins Savannah River National Lab after serving as the provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at the nearby University of South Carolina Aiken (USC Aiken), according to the release. High on Timmons’ priority list will be hastening commercial deployment of the lab’s research and development.
The Savannah River National Laboratory is run by the Battelle Savannah River Alliance, which is made up of Battelle and two industry subcontractors, Longenecker & Associates and TechSource, as well as five universities in Georgia and South Carolina.
Amentum Services, Chantilly, Va., has chosen Travis Johnson, who recently joined the company, to be its new chief financial officer, according to a July 10 press release.
Before joining Amentum, Johnson was a senior vice president, corporate controller and chief accounting officer of defense contractor CACI, Amentum said in its July 10 press release. Johnson has also worked in senior management roles with FLIR Systems and KeyW Corp., the latter of which is now part of Jacobs.
Johnson succeeds Charlie Mathis, who retired in June as chief financial officer. It evidently marks the second time Mathis has retired from a chief financial officer post, having taken the Amentum post in January 2022 after having retired the year before as the top financial executive at SAIC.
