Thomas Zacharia will be the next director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the lab’s management and operating contractor UT-Battelle announced Thursday. Zacharia will take over on July 1, the day current lab director Thom Mason leaves to join Battelle in Columbus, Ohio, as senior vice president for laboratory operations.
Zacharia began at ORNL as a postdoctoral researcher, later serving as director of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division when UT-Battelle took over to manage the lab in 2000. He became ORNL’s deputy for science and technology in 2009, overseeing the lab’s research and development portfolio. After a few years of leave, Zacharia returned to ORNL in 2015.
“He has led many of the innovative research and development initiatives that ORNL has successfully pursued over the past decade,” Joe DiPietro, chair of the UT-Battelle Board of Governors, said in a statement. “His background in materials and computing positions him well to strengthen ORNL’s signature research capabilities in computational, neutron, materials, and nuclear science.”
Meanwhile, Mason, a physicist who led ORNL for a decade, in his new role will work with Ron Townsend, Battelle’s executive vice president of global laboratory operations, to support the six Energy Department labs and one Department of Homeland Security lab that Battelle manages.
The White House last week formally nominated two former National Nuclear Security Administration officials to key administration positions at the Pentagon and the Energy Department.
One, Robert Hood, was nominated to be assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs. Hood was most recently vice president for government affairs at CH2M, an Energy Department contractor, and previously was director of congressional affairs at the NNSA. Hood has also held legislative-affairs positions in the White House and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Senate confirmation will be required for Hood’s position. If confirmed, he would become a liaison between Defense Secretary James Mattis, the White House, cabinet agencies and Congress. LeeAnn Borman is currently the acting assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs.
The White House also nominated David Jonas to be general counsel at the Energy Department. Jonas is currently a partner at the Fluet, Huber & Hoang law firm in Virginia. The Marine Corps. veteran previously served as general counsel for both NNSA and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
The DOE general counsel provides legal support to agency leadership. John Lucas is the acting DOE general counsel.
The biannual plenary meeting of the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism was convened this week in Tokyo, Japan, where partner nations reviewed progress and shared recommendations on the group’s short-term activities.
The GICNT, co-chaired by the United States and Russia, is a partnership of over 80 countries and five organizations working to strengthen global capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to acts of nuclear terrorism.
The State Department said Wednesday that C.S. Eliot Kang, acting assistant secretary for international security and nonproliferation, would attend the meeting on June 1-2.
The plenary meeting included a review of progress made by the partnership’s working groups on nuclear forensics, nuclear detection, and response and mitigation. Nations in attendance were also to discuss the partnership’s activities for 2017-2019, the State Department said.
A GICNT action plan released at the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C. called for more information sharing on multilateral activities and a greater number of capacity building workshops for partner nations.
