U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet this week announced that he has named former Bureau of Land Management director and Capitol Hill veteran Neil Kornze as his chief of staff.

Kornze, who headed the public lands agency under President Barack Obama from 2014 to 2017, is the youngest person to be confirmed as BLM chief. Prior to holding that position, the Nevada native served as the agency’s deputy director, and before that was a senior policy advisor for then-U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, where he helped draft the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009.

Most recently, Kornze was CEO of the Campion Advocacy Fund and the Campion Foundation, nonprofits that push for accessible housing and public lands conservation as solutions to homelessness and climate change, respectively.

He takes over for Amy Friedman, Bennet’s state director, who has been serving as the Democratic senator’s acting chief of staff for the past year since previous chief of staff Jess Smith departed.

“Neil’s passion for Colorado and the American West and his wealth of experience in both the U.S. Senate and the federal government will make him a great asset to our office,” Bennet said in a statement. “We’re grateful to have Neil join our team as I begin my third term.”

Bennet, who won reelection by a wide margin last month to a third full term, serves on the Senate agriculture, finance and intelligence committees. In the current Congress, Bennet chairs the agriculture panel’s Subcommittee on Conservation, Climate, Forestry, and Natural Resources and chairs the finance panel’s Subcommittee on Energy, Natural Resources, and Infrastructure.

During Kornze’s tenure running BLM, the federal government established Browns Canyon National Monument in Chaffee County and Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah.

Calling his new boss a “true champion for working families, Colorado’s public lands and waters, and economic opportunity,” Kornze said in a statement that he’s looking forward to the new job.

“As a native Westerner with deep family roots in Colorado, I’m thrilled to take on the role of chief of staff in Sen. Bennet’s office,” Kornze said.

Kornze’s family settled in the Denver area in the late 1800s and has been involved in prominent Colorado institutions, including the Denver Mint and the Colorado School of Mines.

A graduate of Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, Kornze holds a master’s degree in International Relations at the London School of Economics. He served as an international election observer in Macedonia, the Ukraine and Georgia, and co-authored an article in “The Oxford Companion to American Law.”