Speaker Bio:

Dr. Greg Zacharias serves as Chief Scientist to the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, providing scientific and technical (S&T) guidance on the overall approach to assessing the operational effectiveness, suitability, and survivability of major DOD weapon systems. He advises the DOT&E in critical S&T areas including: emerging technologies; modeling and simulation (M&S); human-systems integration; and test design/analysis. Dr. Zacharias also represents the DOT&E on technical groups focused on policy, programs, and technology assessments, interacting with the DOD, industry, and academia.

Before this appointment, Dr. Zacharias was the Chief Scientist of the US Air Force (USAF), advising the Secretary and the Chief of Staff, providing assessments on a range of S&T issues affecting the Air Force mission, and interacting with other Air Staff principals, acquisition organizations, and S&T communities. He served on the Executive Committee of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), and was the principal USAF S&T representative to the civilian scientific/engineering community and the public. His office published an autonomous systems roadmap entitled “Autonomous Horizons: The Way Forward.”

Earlier, Dr. Zacharias served as President and Senior Principal Scientist of Charles River Analytics, providing strategic direction for the Government Services and Commercial Solutions Divisions. Before co-founding Charles River, he was a Senior Scientist at Raytheon/BBN, where he developed and applied models of human decision-making in multi-agent dynamic environments. Earlier, as a Research Engineer at the CS Draper Laboratory, Dr. Zacharias focused on advanced human/machine interface design issues for the Space Shuttle, building on an earlier USAF assignment at NASA, where he was responsible for preliminary design definition of the Shuttle reentry flight control system.

Dr. Zacharias served on the Air Force SAB for eight years, contributing to nine summer studies, including chairing a study on “Future Operations Concepts for Unmanned Aircraft Systems.” As a SAB member he also chaired the Human System Wing Advisory Group, was a member of Air Combat Command’s Advisory Group, and served as a technical program reviewer for the Air Force Research Laboratory. He was a member of the National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Human-Systems Integration for over ten years, supporting several NRC studies including a DMSO-sponsored study of military human behavior models, and co-chairing a follow-up USAF-sponsored study to identify promising DOD S&T investments in the area. He has served on the DOD Human Systems Technology Area Review and Assessment (TARA) Panel, Embry-Riddle’s Research Advisory Board, MIT’s Engineering Systems Division Advisory Board, the Board of the Small Business Technology Council (SBTC), and was the founding Chair of the Human Systems Division of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA).

Dr. Zacharias obtained his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, where he was an MIT Sloan Scholar. He is a Distinguished Graduate and Distinguished Alumnus of USAF Officer Training School (OTS), and has received the USAF Exceptional Civilian Service Award, and twice received the USAF Meritorious Civilian Service Award.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Yisroel Brumer is the Principal Deputy Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In this role, he oversees all CAPE analysis and activities including strategic studies, programmatic analysis, and cost estimates across the entire Department of Defense. In particular, he leads CAPE’s involvement in the annual program and budget review process, providing oversight and decision support for content and funding for the entire DoD five-year fiscal year defense program. Within the acquisitions process, he leads CAPE’s oversight of all major investment programs across the DoD, with particular emphasis on the analysis of alternative investment strategies, cost estimation, cost-benefit analyses, economic analyses, and programmatic tradeoffs. He also guides the Strategic Portfolio Reviews – cross-cutting studies requested by the Secretary of Defense on high-interest issues critical to the success of the Department. Finally, he oversees Independent Cost Estimates and cost analysis, ensuring that such processes provide accurate information and realistic estimates of acquisition program cost to senior Department leaders and Congressional defense committees.
From 2017 to 2018, Dr. Brumer was CAPE’s Deputy Director for Analysis and Innovation, where he was responsible for executing major cross-cutting analyses across the entire Defense portfolio. Beginning in 2012, he led CAPE’s Strategic, Defensive, and Space Programs Division, providing advice and analysis on over $60B per year of programs ranging from antiterrorism to intercontinental ballistic missiles. In that role, he was hand-picked to oversee the Secretary of Defense’s number one priority, a multibillion dollar revamp of the entire nuclear enterprise, including a cultural overhaul and the initial stages of the Nuclear Triad modernization. From 2010 to 2012, he served as Director of CAPE’s Program Analysis Division, where he led major cross-cutting analyses and all DoD Front End Assessments, all selected by and briefed directly to the Secretary of Defense. Dr. Brumer first joined CAPE in 2005 as an Operations Research Analyst, where he conducted analysis and provided advice to senior leaders on analytical tradeoffs in the DoD’s science and technology, homeland defense, nuclear command and control, and combating weapons of mass destruction portfolios.
Dr. Brumer holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics and a Master of Science in Chemistry from Harvard University, as well as a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of Toronto. After conducting postdoctoral research at Harvard on the physics of complex biological systems, he joined the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate as a fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where he was a pioneering member of a number of key programs.
Dr. Brumer has received the Presidential Rank Award of Meritorious Executive, the Secretary of Defense Medal for Meritorious Civilian Service (with Bronze Palm), the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence, the Space and Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance High Impact Analysis Award, and the Daniel Wilson Scholarship in Chemistry, as well as other awards. When not in the Pentagon, Dr. Brumer enjoys spending time with his fantastic wife Kim and their two excellent children, Eliana and Netanel.

Speaker Bio: Michael Seablom is the Chief Technologist for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. He has the responsibility for surveying and assessing technology needs for the Heliophysics, Astrophysics, Earth Science, and Planetary Science Divisions, and is the primary liaison to the NASA Office of Chief Technologist and the Space Technology Mission Directorate.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Laura A. McNamara is Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She’s spent her career partnering with computer scientists, software engineers, physicists, human factors experts, organizational psychologists, remote sensing and imagery scientists, and national security analysts in a wide range of settings.  She has expertise in user-centered technology design and evaluation, information visualization/visual analytics, and mixed qualitative/quantitative social science research. Most of her projects involve challenges in sensor management, technology usability, and innovation feasibility and adoption. She enjoys working in Agile and Agile-like environments and is a skilled leader of interdisciplinary engineering, scientific, and software teams.  She is passionate about ensuring usability, utility, and adaptability of visualization, operational, and analytic software.

Dr. McNamara’s current work focuses on operational and analytic workflows in remote sensing environments.  She is also an expert on visual cognitive workflows in team environments, focused on the role of user interfaces and analytic technologies to support exploratory data analysis and information creation with large, disparate, unwieldy datasets, from text to remote sensing.  Dr. McNamara has longstanding interest in the epistemology and practices of computational modeling and simulation, verification and validation, and uncertainty quantification.  She has worked with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Missile Defense Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the nuclear weapons programs at Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories to enhance the effective use of modeling and simulation in interdisciplinary R&D projects.

Speaker Bio:

Norton A. Schwartz serves as President and CEO of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a nonprofit corporation operating in the public interest. IDA manages three Federally Funded Research and Development Centers that answer the most challenging U.S. security and science policy questions with objective analysis leveraging extraordinary scientific, technical, and analytic expertise. At IDA, General Schwartz (U.S. Air Force, retired) directs the activities of more than 1,000 scientists and technologists employed by IDA.
General Schwartz has a long and prestigious career of service and leadership that spans over five decades. He was most recently President and CEO of Business Executives for National Security (BENS). During his 6-year tenure at BENS, he was also a member of IDA’s Board of Trustees.
Prior to retiring from the U.S. Air Force, General Schwartz served as the 19th Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force from 2008 to 2012. He previously held senior joint positions as Director of the Joint Staff and as the Commander of the U.S. Transportation Command. He began his service as a pilot with the airlift evacuation out of Vietnam in 1975. General Schwartz is a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate and holds a master’s degree in business administration from Central Michigan University. He is also an alumnus of the Armed Forces Staff College and the National War College. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a 1994 Fellow of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Seminar XXI. General Schwartz has been married to Suzie since 1981.