John Zepper

John Zepper has served as Sandia National Laboratories’ Director of Information & Security Engineering and Chief Information Officer since September 2020.

Prior to that, John led Sandia’s Space Mission Program and was Director of the Labs’ Systems Mission Engineering, an organization that developed distributed sensing systems to solve a broad spectrum of problems of national importance, with a workforce of more than 400 scientists, engineers, and technologists, and customers in the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community. John has vast experience delivering products using agile coding techniques in the cloud environment. In particular, he was responsible for creating large, real-time information systems that process data from multiple U.S. satellite systems, performing research in information surety topics, and providing decision support systems. He also headed development of path-finding satellite systems that advanced mission performance beyond the state of the art.

In December 2013, John and his team were honored as Popular Science’s “Grand Award Winner in Engineering” for the Gigabit Passive Optical Network, named best innovation of the year. John and his team won the DOE Secretary of Energy’s Achievement Award for the Space-Based Infrared System Geosynchronous Starer Processor in 2016. The following year, he was part of the team that created Hardware Acceleration of Adaptive Neural Algorithms, a spatial temporal neuromorphic processor grand challenge that delivered 100-times faster and 1,000 times more energy-efficient processing of cyber security information. In 2018, John was part of a team that created an agile code development space to improve collaboration and productivity, and the next year he was part of the team that created Science and Technology Advancing Resilience for Contested Space, which advances the nation’s capabilities to maintain and expand its freedom of action in the space domain.

During his 39-year career in the National Nuclear Science Administration community, John has led Sandia’s Cyber Security Services & Technologies Program, its Nuclear Weapons Classified Computing Service Improvement Program, and its Nuclear Weapons Joint Computational Engineering Laboratory Program core team. He also gained leadership experience in building Advance Simulation & Computing (ASC) supercomputers and in writing parallel code for the Nuclear Weapons ASC Engineering Program.

John has his Bachelor and Master of Science from the University of New Mexico, where he met his wife. Married with two daughters and a son, John enjoys family time, restoring vintage motor scooters, and beekeeping.