Information Engineering Executive Director & Chief Information Officer
As the Information Engineering Executive Director and Chief Information Officer for Sandia National Laboratories, John Zepper provides leadership in quality and performance assurance, cybersecurity and mission computing, surety engineering and weapons quality, and information technology services.
In his previous roles at Sandia, John led the Labs’ Space Mission Program and was director of Systems Mission Engineering, an organization of more than 400 scientists, engineers and technologists that develop distributed sensing systems to solve a broad spectrum of problems of national importance for the U.S. 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 named the Grand Award Winner in Engineering by Popular Science for their Gigabit Passive Optical Network. The network also won 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 34-year career in the NNSA 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 supercomputers and in writing parallel code for the Nuclear Weapons ASC Engineering Program.
John earned his Bachelor and Master of Science degrees from the University of New Mexico.
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