Siegfried Hecker is the former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Professor Emeritus of Stanford University. He is currently professor of practice at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Texas A&M University. He retired from the Los Alamos National Laboratory after 34 years including serving as the fifth director from 1986 to 1997. He was at Stanford University for 17 years in the School of Engineering and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), including serving as co-director from 2007 to 2012.
Hecker has worked on nuclear matters for most of his career, including having visited all countries with declared nuclear weapons programs, including North Korea. Hecker is the editor of Doomed to Cooperate (2016), two volumes documenting the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation and Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program (2023) written with Elliot Serbin. Hecker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of numerous professional societies. Among other awards, he has received the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award (2009); the National Academy of Engineering Arthur M. Bueche Award; the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Science Diplomacy; the American Physical Society’s Leo Szilard Lectureship; the American Nuclear Society's Seaborg Medal and the Eisenhower Medal; the Department of Energy's E.O. Lawrence Award; and the Los Alamos National Laboratory Medal.