NNSA Defense Programs chief to tour Lab, have All-Employee Meeting

Don Cook, new deputy administrator, also to present NNSA Defense Programs Awards of Excellence and Pollution Prevention Awards

August 26, 2010—The new NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs, Don Cook, will spend two days touring key facilities and getting a wide variety of briefings at the Laboratory starting Monday, August 30. On Monday, Cook will address Lab employees at 2:45 p.m. in the Pete V. Domenici auditorium at the National Security Sciences Building at TA-3. Following the all-employee talk, Cook will present NNSA Defense Programs Awards of Excellence and the Pollution Prevention Awards.

Cook was sworn in on June 30. As deputy administrator, he oversees the nuclear weapons program for NNSA and is responsible for ensuring that the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe, secure, and effective without the need for underground testing.

Cook most recently served as managing director and chief executive officer of the Atomic Weapons Establishment in the United Kingdom from 2006 to 2009. In this capacity, he was accountable for AWE’s performance on the contract with the UK Ministry of Defence.

Prior to leading AWE, 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 Microsystems and Engineering Sciences Applications (MESA) Program Center, accountable for design and construction of the 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 Fusion Research Department from 1984-1993 and was director of pulsed power sciences from 1993-1999.

He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute of Physics.