As NNSA’s Chief of Staff, Dr. Steven Ho is the primary point of contact within the Office of the Administrator for NNSA’s senior leadership team and works directly with leaders across the Department of Energy, NNSA headquarters, and NNSA field offices on a variety of areas that affect the NNSA mission, organization, and operations. He has served in the position since 2022 and is a member of the Senior Executive Service.
Previously, Dr. Ho was NNSA’s Director of the Office of Cost Estimating and Program Evaluation (CEPE), reporting directly to the NNSA Administrator as the principal advisor to the Administrator and Secretary of Energy on cost estimating and program analysis within NNSA. He led CEPE in conducting independent cost estimates on NNSA’s construction projects and weapons programs, managing the annual program review of NNSA’s budget, providing independent review on analysis of alternatives, and executing corporate analysis of programs and cross-cutting issues across NNSA.
Prior to joining NNSA, Dr. Ho served as a cost analyst for more than eight years in the Office of the Secretary of Defense Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, where he was instrumental in restructuring several major defense acquisition programs. In both positions, he created and briefed analyses to the highest political and career federal leadership in the Departments of Defense and Energy.
Dr. Ho was a Science and Technology Policy Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where he managed basic science programs. He was also a project manager for a NASA-funded nanotechnology research center at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he helped stand up the new center. Dr. Ho earned a doctorate and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from UCLA and a bachelor’s degree in applied physics from Yale University.