Siegfried S. (Sig) Hecker
Siegfried S. (Sig) Hecker was director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from January 1986 to November 1997, during which time he was instrumental in forging the lab-to-lab nuclear cooperation with the Russian nuclear weapons complex. That effort was continued as a senior fellow at the laboratory and after his transition to Stanford University in 2005. He has traveled to Russia more than 50 times to promote cooperation in nuclear safety and security, as well as to pursue collaborative scientific research.
He first came to Los Alamos in 1965 as a summer student before receiving his PhD in metallurgy and materials science from Case Western Reserve University in 1968. From 2005 until his retirement in August 2022, Dr. Hecker was a professor (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. In September 2022 he joined the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies as Distinguished Professor of Practice. He is a member of the U. S. National Academy of Engineering and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences among other distinctions.
He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Mountain View, California, with his wife, Nina. They have four daughters—Lisa, Linda, Lori, and Leslie—and two grandchildren, Noah and Ava.
- Siegfried Hecker’s Stanford University page
- Siegfried Hecker’s National Academy of Engineering page