Director-designate
Alex King

“I’m absolutely delighted to be here,” said Alex King, at a Nov. 12 Ames Laboratory reception in his honor.  King will begin serving as the Lab’s new director on Jan. 1.  “You can’t believe how honored I am to have been selected for the job and how pleased I am to be here,” he said after acknowledging his respect for the strength of the final pool of candidates for the director position.

In no time at all, King established himself as another fellow co-worker and friend within the Ames Lab community when he requested, “Please, please, please call me Alex.  I’ll answer to Dr. King or Professor King,” he said, “but I really prefer Alex.”

Sharing an anecdote about finding his horoscope (cancer) in the Iowa State Daily earlier that morning, King had employees both laughing and cheering him on when he read it aloud.

“ ‘Today is an eight.  (“I give it a 10,” interjected King.)  The job is huge, but don’t be afraid.  Break it into doable chunks and get started.  You have super powers.’ ”

Moving from humor to a more inspiring note, King said, “This is an incredible lab.  It has a tremendous history.  The more I’ve looked into it, the more delighted I’ve been that I’m coming here.  Ames Lab does the kind of things that I read about in textbooks when I was in college.  Things you should be able to do this lab has done and continues to do, and it’s only made possible by the people here.”

Answering a question many employees had wondered about, King said he didn’t think there would be any huge need for massive change anywhere in the Lab.  “I asked a lot of people in Washington what they thought I needed to do in the Lab, and they kept coming up with one answer:  ‘Whatever you do, don’t mess up the great science they do there.’ So, I’ll take that as an instruction, and I won’t mess that up,” he added.

King noted, however, that he would attend to a couple of relatively small things that came out of an interesting experience.  “Since the announcement was made that I was going to be your director, I’ve received well over a hundred congratulatory notes and e-mails, and in some cases I’ve been congratulated on becoming the director of a NASA facility,” he said, which generated knowing laughter from employees.  (The NASA Ames Research Center is in Moffett Field, Calif.)

Continuing, King said, “The other thing that’s happened in two cases is that I’ve been congratulated on my move to the University of Iowa.  So I think we need to pay a little bit of attention to making it clear what the Ames Lab is, where it is and what it does, and making that a bit more well known to the community.  I’ll take that on as my task,” he promised.  “If you guys keep doing the great science, I’ll take care of selling it.”