Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) has appointed Jim Yeck as the project director for the Electron–Ion Collider (EIC), which will open new vistas on the properties and dynamics of quarks and gluons. Yeck has held leading roles in BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and National Synchrotron Light Source II, the US hardware contribution to the LHC project, and the IceCube neutrino observatory. He was also former director general of the European Spallation Source. Yeck will head a newly created EIC directorate at BNL, working in partnership with Jefferson Laboratory and others. The EIC is scheduled to begin operations at BNL at the end of the decade.