Sandy Willis has been a member of the Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (DOE-IN) since 2004 and currently serves as the Acting Director. In this role, she serves as the Department's senior intelligence and counterintelligence officer, executing the Department's nuclear and energy intelligence missions at headquarters as well as across the national laboratories, plants, and sites.
Prior to assuming her current position, Ms. Willis served as the Principal Deputy Director for DOE-IN from March 2024 to February 2026, where she assisted the Director in overseeing the entire DOE-IN infrastructure and managing the organization’s foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and cyber intelligence functions. She also previously served as the Chair of the interagency Foreign Nuclear Weapons Intelligence Initiative (FNWII) Technical Working Group (TWG) from 2018 to March 2024. As the FNWII TWG Chair, Ms. Willis led interagency program planning and coordination to achieve the initiative’s goal of integrating the technical contributions of the National Nuclear Security Administration weapons laboratories in the intelligence analysis of foreign nuclear weapons activities. From 2011 to 2015, Ms. Willis served as the Director of the Foreign Nuclear Programs Division, DOE-IN’s largest analytic division. Prior to that, she filled positions as an analyst, briefer, and team lead focused on nuclear terrorism.
Before coming to DOE-IN, Ms. Willis served for seven years as a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, to include a year-long deployment to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. She graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1997 with a Bachelor of Science and earned a master’s degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University in 2008.