NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced the selection of Mark Geyer as the next director of the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. He assumed the director’s position on May 25, when current Center Director and former astronaut, Ellen Ochoa, retired after 30 years at the agency.

As Johnson’s center director, he’ll lead one of NASA’s largest installations, which has about 10,000 civil service and contractor employees — including those at White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico — and oversee a broad range of human spaceflight activities.

Geyer served as the acting deputy associate administrator for Technical for the Human Explorations and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. In that position, which he assumed October 1, 2017, he was responsible for assisting the associate administrator in providing strategic direction for all aspects of NASA’s human spaceflight exploration mission. Before that, Geyer served as deputy center director at Johnson until September 2017.