Sandia Labs director to retire in April 2025

The director of Sandia National Laboratories, James Peery, will retire next spring after five years at the helm.

A Labs spokesperson confirmed Peery’s retirement and said the director will retire at the end of April.

Spokesperson Darrick Hurst said the board of directors for the National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia — the managing entity of Sandia Labs — will “begin the process of selecting the next Laboratories director, which historically has taken several months.”

Peery took over as Sandia Labs’ 16th director in January 2020. He replaced former Sandia Labs Director Stephen Younger, who retired at the end of 2019.

Peery, who holds a doctoral degree in nuclear engineering from Texas A&M University, came to Sandia Labs from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where he served as the associate laboratory director of National Security Sciences.

While Peery spent a few years in Tennessee, his career actually began at Sandia Labs in 1990. He worked in a variety of departments in those early years, including the Computational Solid Mechanics and Structural Dynamics Department and the Computational Physics Department.

By 2002, though, Peery had left Sandia Labs for Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he served in different leadership roles.

He returned to Sandia just a few years later in 2007 and, by 2015, had become Sandia’s vice president of Defense Systems and Assessments — a role where Peery oversaw the development and integration of “advanced science and technology into state-of-the-art systems for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Defense and other national security agencies,” according to his bio.

He left for Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2017 before again returning as Sandia’s newest director at the start of 2020.

The next director of Sandia Labs will lead a large workforce, which stands at more than 16,800, and will oversee a multi-billion-dollar budget.