Cook to move to NNSA

Donald L. Cook has been nominated by the Obama administration to be the deputy administrator for defense programs at the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration .

Cook was the managing director of the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in the UK from 2006 to 2009. AWE manages all aspects of the UK nuclear weapons program, including decommissioning, dismantlement, and disposal.

Before that Cook worked at Sandia National Laboratories for 28 years in Pulsed Power Sciences, Microtechnologies, Infrastructure, and Security. From 1999 to 2006, he was director of the MESA Program Center, accountable for design and construction of the Microsystems and Engineering Sciences Applications (MESA) complex .

In 2003, he assumed program director responsibilities for Sandia’s Infrastructure Program and for Sandia’s Safeguards and Security Technologies Program , which responded to a new Design Basis Threat.

From 1977 to 1999, Cook led efforts in pulsed power accelerator design and experimentation, fusion research, hydrodynamics, radiography, diagnostic development, and computational code development.

He managed the Sandia Inertial Confinement Fusion program from 1984-1993 and was director of Pulsed Power Sciences from 1993 to 1999.

Cook is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and afFellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the UK-based Institute of Physics .

Paul Guinnessy