Howard Sklamberg, a former top U.S. Food and Drug Administration official, has joined Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C., bringing him back to private practice for the first time in nearly 20 years.

Sklamberg had been the agency’s deputy commissioner for global regulatory operations and policy since 2014, after serving in various roles at the FDA. He spent about a dozen years as a prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice before joining the agency in 2010.