Maxwell School professor Sean O'Keefe chosen to head NASA

Also available: White House Press Release / NASA Biography / Syracuse Post-Standard article

President George W. Bush has selected Sean O’Keefe, Louis A. Bantle Professor of Business and Government Policy at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, to head the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).  On leave since March 2001, O’Keefe has been deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

At the Maxwell School, O’Keefe was director of the National Securities Studies Program, which provides executive education to senior military and high-level Department of Defense civilian managers. He served as secretary of the Navy under President George H.W. Bush in 1992 and as comptroller and chief financial officer of the Department of Defense from 1989 to 1992. Before joining then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney’s Pentagon management team, he served for eight years on the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee and was staff director of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. O’Keefe’s public service began in 1978 as a presidential management intern.

In 1993, O’Keefe received the Distinguished Public Service award from Cheney. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and served as chair of an Academy panel on investigative practices. He was a visiting scholar at the Wolfson College of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

O’Keefe is a member of the Naval Postgraduate School’s civil-military relations seminar team for emerging democracies and has conducted seminars for the Strategic Studies Group at Oxford University.

O’Keefe earned a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University in New Orleans in 1977 and an M.P.A. from the Maxwell School in 1978.

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The Maxwell School of Syracuse University, founded in 1924, is the premier academic institution in the United States committed to scholarship, civic leadership, and education in public and international affairs.  Maxwell is home to Syracuse University’s social science departments and to numerous nationally recognized multidisciplinary graduate programs in public administration, international studies, social policy, and conflict resolution. 

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Contact: Jill Leonhardt, director of communications, (315) 443-5492; jlleonha@maxwell.syr.edu.