George Peter Nanos
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George Peter (Pete) Nanos was the former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from January 2003 to May 2005. As of 2005 he was the shortest serving director of the laboratory. Initially he was given the title "interim director", but in July 2003 he was made a permanent director. There were several scandals during his tenure including, missing classified disks (which turned out to be a result of sloppy records), improper charges on lab credit cards and a student injured her eye with a laser ([1] PDF). These scandals forced Nanos to close the lab for nearly seven months (July 2004 to January 2005). The shutdowns could have cost as much as $367 million USD [2]. In frustration he called rule breaking scientists at the lab, "cowboys" and "buttheads". He left Los Alamos to take a job at the Pentagon (specifically the Defense Threat Reduction Agency). The year he left there was a large spike in retirements [3] and an employee run blog discredited and attacked Nanos [4]. His successor will be Robert W. Kuckuck. Nanos left under a cloud of perceived mismanagement.