NIH’s GWAC leader moves to new agencywide job

All News

NIH’s GWAC leader moves to new agencywide job

Mary Armstead has been tapped to be the new acting associate director of the Office of Acquisition and Management for the National Institutes of Health. She is ...

Tom Temin@tteminWFED

September 11, 2012 5:58 am

1 min read

(Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Mary Armstead’s new title. She will become the acting associate director of the Office of Acquisition and Management at NIH).

Mary Armstead, the director of the National Institutes of Health Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC), will have a new job starting Oct. 1. She’s been tapped to be acting associate director of the Office of Acquisition and Management for NIH. She’ll report to the director, Diane Frasier. The agencywide post has responsibilities for NIH’s parent department, Health and Human Services.

Mary Armstead, program director for NITAAC, at the Federal News Radio studios. (Photo by Jolie Lee/Federal News Radio)

Armstead will have responsibility for oversight of NIH contracting, acquisition policy, credit card programs, blanket purchase agreements and the financial management division. For all of HHS, she’ll supervise the negotiations of indirect cost agreements with commercial entities for research and development contracts and grant recipients.

A long-serving public servant, Armstead told Federal News Radio that just last week, she received a pin for 40 years of service. “I thought I would be retiring after NITAAC,” she said.

NITAAC operates the Chief Information Officer-Solutions and Partners 3 governmentwide acquisition contracts, or CIO-SP3. It recently awarded the small business set-aside version of CIO-SP3, but is yet to award the HUB Zone version, Armstead said. The unrestricted set of 54 contracts was awarded in May.