Nanos Made Permanent

After serving several months as interim director of the troubled Los Alamos National Laboratory, physicist and former US Navy vice admiral George “Pete” Nanos has been named the permanent director. “I had intended to conduct a national search for a new director… but Pete Nanos’s superb performance over the last several months makes such a process unnecessary,” said University of California President Richard Atkinson when he named Nanos in mid-May. The university manages Los Alamos.

Nanos became interim director on 6 January after a string of accounting and security controversies and crises led to the resignation of John Browne, a physicist who had led the lab for five years. “Under the most trying of circumstances, Pete has provided bold, innovative, and compassionate leadership to the hard-working men and women of the… laboratory,” Atkinson said.

Nanos, the former commander of the Naval Sea Systems Command and the navy’s strategic nuclear program, has instituted a series of reforms at the lab, the most recent of which was a restructuring of the business operations division. “I have to have a very direct relationship with how this laboratory does business,” Nanos told the Los Alamos staff.