As Labs Director Laura McGill wraps up her first year leading Sandia, she also received the highest distinction conferred by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

“It’s quite humbling when I reflect on the aerospace and defense leaders that have come before me and how I’ve been inspired by them,” Laura said. “This is not something that I could have foreseen, and I’m overwhelmed by it.”

On May 18, Laura was inducted as an AIAA Honorary Fellow during a ceremony in Washington, D.C. Laura is a Lifetime Fellow of AIAA and served as the institute’s president from 2022 to 2024.

“I remember when I was president and making the calls to notify selectees that they were to be inducted as a Fellow or recognized as an Honorary Fellow,” she said, adding that it is customary for the president to call each honoree personally. “It’s among the most rewarding duties of the president.”

In February, Laura was on the receiving end of that phone call when current AIAA President Dan Hastings called from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to let her know she had been selected as an Honorary Fellow.

“Even though I know when the notifications are typically made, when Dan called, I assumed that it was about something else that we were working on,” she said. “It was especially memorable to receive the news from a highly respected colleague.”

Career influence

Laura has been a member of AIAA since early in her career.

“I served on a national technical committee and helped develop measurement and other standards for aerodynamic testing facilities, i.e., wind tunnels, that are still in use today. It’s a privilege to have that kind of impact on your industry when you are in low-level engineering roles,” she said. “Through AIAA, I served on teams to help drive advancements that were well beyond my job assignment, while working with aerospace and defense leaders from all over the world.”

Those connections have been invaluable throughout her career, and she reflected that she met many of her leadership role models through the AIAA. “I learned from how they assessed national challenges and developed opportunities to shape the industry,” she said.

Laura said her goal was never to get to a certain level of leadership or to be the director of a national laboratory, but she feels that she is in the right place at the right time to lead the Labs.

“I just wanted to make meaningful contributions as a member of high-performing teams that were developing important leading-edge systems. I hoped to do cool engineering work and build new technical skills, which makes it fun in spite of the daunting challenges. Work should be fun,” she said, smiling.

Systems approach

Now, a year into leading Sandia, Laura said she is applying her systems engineering background as Labs director.

“We have approximately 16,000 exceptional employees, acres of advanced technology equipment and capabilities that don’t exist anywhere else. Sandia is a large, complex system,” she said. “We’re a unique national lab, and the nation calls on us to do work that no other organization can do. Sandia is the premier engineering national laboratory and serves as the lead system integrator for nuclear weapons programs.”

Laura said that systems integration can be applied to all Sandia work, a point she emphasized at a recent all-hands meeting.

“I will continue emphasizing that we are bigger than the sum of all our parts. I want our employees to see how their contributions fit into that bigger system, and how they each help it to work more seamlessly when it’s all pulled together,” Laura said.

Stepping up

Laura credited Sandia’s talented leadership team for helping the Labs navigate the unusually complex challenges that arose during her first year as the director.

“We worked in a very dynamic and challenging environment in 2025,” she said.

Laura also recognized her predecessor, James Peery, who retired in April 2025, for strongly positioning the Labs, and ensuring that staff focused on critical work for which Sandia is uniquely suited.

She wants Sandia to continue building science and engineering capabilities that contribute directly to the Labs’ deterrence mission, operate efficiently and effectively to accelerate deliveries in all mission spaces and prepare for the future by anticipating the threat landscape. She added that advancing applications of artificial intelligence and maturing quantum computing and sensing devices are important elements of that future.

“Sandia is stepping up to serve the nation in ways that are truly incredible,” Laura said.

A space for connections

Laura makes a point to walk through the tech area to get to meetings, instead of driving, so that she can see and talk to employees along the way.

“It’s been fun to get around, meet more of our people and learn more about their work,” Laura said. “During one of my walks out in the technical area, I had an employee tell me, ‘I’ve never met a Labs director before.’”

Laura said employees provide her with motivation.

“I’m inspired by the commitment of Sandians to deliver exceptional service in the national interest,” she said. “It’s a privilege to lead this amazing team. I feel that I’m in the right place at the right time.”