President Biden intends to nominate Stacey Dixon, an intelligence community veteran and current deputy director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), to serve as the principal deputy director in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the White House announced today.
The nomination would have Dixon working closely with DNI Avril Haines and requires Senate confirmation.
Dixon has been called a “champion of innovation” and a “barrier breaker” by the intelligence community (IC). Her time as deputy director of NGA was her second stint with the agency, after previously serving in various leadership roles from 2010-2016.
She went back to NGA in 2019, after serving as the deputy director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) from 2016-18 and as the director of IARPA for 10 months. At IARPA, Dixon was tasked with overseeing a variety of research programs looking to tackle challenges in the IC.
In her first stint at NGA, Dixon worked her way up from the chief of congressional affairs to the office director of Innovision, and finally to deputy director of Innovision. Her roles in the Innovision department, NGIA’s research directorate, put Dixon at the forefront of geospatial intelligence research and development.
