Brent Park

Dr. Brent Park serves on the board of advisors of FDD’s Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program.

Brent collaborates with and advises representatives of the U.S. national defense, homeland security, and intelligence communities in the application of advanced technologies to meet national security requirements. He brings demonstrated leadership experience in complex multidisciplinary science and engineering programs at DOE national laboratories. In early 2018, just six weeks after being nominated by the president, the U.S. Senate confirmed Brent unanimously as deputy administrator, National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). For nearly three years, Brent led NNSA’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation program to support the nation’s efforts in nonproliferation treaties and international arms control, international nuclear security, safeguards, and export control policies.

Prior to joining NNSA, Brent was associate laboratory director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), leading the science-to-application efforts for national security programs. His research topics are wide ranging and with particular focus on materials science and engineering, cybersecurity, high performance computing and big data analytics, artificial intelligence, nuclear science, and engineering.

Before joining ORNL, Brent was the director of NNSA’s Remote Sensing Laboratory, where he led efforts to advance and field cutting-edge diagnostics and communications instruments in support of counterterrorism and radiological incident response for the nation. Earlier, Brent managed and contributed to basic and applied research programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the areas of physics and engineering, modeling and analysis, nuclear weapons physics, and engineering in support of stockpile stewardship as well as nuclear emergency response and nuclear facility operations.

Brent earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics at Illinois State University and an M.A. in physics with an emphasis on remote sensing at Indiana State University. Later Brent shifted the direction of his research to nuclear physics and earned an M.S. at Indiana University. Brent performed a thesis experiment using the spallation neutron source at the LANL and earned a PhD in physics at Ohio University. He held a prestigious Physics Division postdoctoral fellowship at LANL before becoming a technical staff member.