James S. Peery

As the Labs Director for Sandia National Laboratories, Dr. James S. Peery provides leadership and management direction for the safe, secure execution of all Sandia missions.

Before his appointment as Sandia Director on Jan. 1, 2020, James served as associate laboratory director for national security sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), overseeing research and development programs that support the national security missions of the U.S. Department of Energy and other government agencies. These included preventing and countering the spread of weapons of mass destruction, accelerating adoption of computing beyond Moore’s Law, providing resilience to cyber systems, and advancing autonomous national security capabilities through materials science, advanced manufacturing and electrification.

James served as Sandia’s Vice President for Defense Systems and Assessments from March 2015 to April 2017. In this role, he was responsible for developing and integrating 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. Areas of focus included nuclear weapons electronics, integrated military systems, information operations, proliferation assessments, remote sensing and verification, space missions, surveillance and reconnaissance, and science and technology products.

From April 2010 to March 2015, James was Director of Sandia’s Information Systems Analysis Center, responsible for development and application of new information technologies that enable information superiority for customers of Sandia’s national security and critical infrastructure work. Prior to that, he directed the Computation, Computers, Information and Mathematics (CCIM) center, which forms the foundation of Sandia’s research and development activities in high performance computing. CCIM contains the Computer Science Research Institute, the joint Institute for Advanced Architectures and Algorithms with ORNL, and the Alliance for Computing at Extreme Scales with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). During this period, James directed the NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC).

James served in several leadership roles at LANL from 2002 to 2007 before returning to Sandia in the positions of Hydrodynamic Experiments Division Leader, Principal Deputy Associate Director of LANL’s Nuclear Weapons program and Program Director of the NNSA’s ASC.

James began his career at Sandia in 1990. He worked in the Computational Solid Mechanics and Structural Dynamics Department and the Computational Physics Department. James has been responsible for the development of state-of-the-art, massively parallel computational tools spanning the fields of high energy density physics to structural dynamics. James’ major research areas are in Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian algorithms and parallel algorithms, where he has published more than 50 papers. As part of the Salinas team, James was awarded the 2002 Gordon Bell Award. James holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering from Texas A&M University.