Commitment to National Security & the Warfighter.

Science and engineering were part of family life long before they became a career. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, ties to the Department of Energy’s national laboratories ran through a grandfather at Sandia National Laboratories and a father who retired from DOE service there. My mother’s involvement in supercomputing added an early connection to computational science.

Physics studies at the University of New Mexico and early experience at Sandia and White Sands Missile Range brought together scientific theory, optical engineering and range instrumentation. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, developing offline analysis and reconstruction software for CAPTAIN’s liquid-argon time projection chamber particle detector drew me further into computational physics.

Research in the laboratory’s Theoretical Division, T-3, then took me into the Navier–Stokes equations, turbulent reacting flows, combustion and moving meshes. Computational development in KIVA and FEARCE included integrating GridPro structured meshes.

Founding B-CFD brought the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Peter Eiseman of GridPro on NASA-related CFD benchmark projects. Those experiences continue to shape how we connect the mathematics of physical behavior with the practical demands of engineering software at PALLC.

At Northrop Grumman Space Systems, serving as Chief Scientist/Engineer connected that computational foundation to advanced-threat and counter-hypersonic modeling, space surveillance and mission simulation. Responsibilities included leading DARC modeling-and-simulation research as principal investigator and contributing to enterprise analyses of joint all-domain command and control.

Serving as a GS15/NH04 senior federal government civilian at the Space Development Agency meant addressing those integration questions from inside federal acquisition. That assignment covered enterprise digital engineering, modeling and simulation, warfighter integration, and space integration for joint fire control.

That experience shaped a conviction at the heart of PALLC: decisions within individual programs shape the performance of a much larger mission architecture. Integration depends on shared meaning, compatible models and interfaces, and an understanding of how uncertainty affects the mission. Acquisition decisions and organizational boundaries are part of that engineering problem.

Collaboration with Dr. Paul Wach, Dr. Bernard P. Zeigler and Dr. Doohwan (DH) Kim helped shape the mathematical foundations we apply at PALLC. Semantic ontologies establish shared meaning. Model-based systems engineering connects requirements, structure and behavior. DEVS—the Discrete Event System Specification formalism—provides a foundation for composing models through defined interfaces and event semantics. Its closure-under-coupling property allows a coupled model to be represented as a model in its own right.

These foundations matter when separately developed models must execute together: their interfaces and behavior need to remain consistent as the larger system changes.

We bring that perspective into one adaptively scalable, SI-augmented Digital Engineering, Modeling & Simulation (DEM&S) environment. We automate model preparation and transformation, connect existing engineering tools and simulators, and link requirements to model configurations and tests. Customers can compare alternatives, investigate integration problems and focus test and evaluation on the conditions that matter. Customer-sponsored research and development adapts those integrations to program requirements, with verification and validation matched to the models’ intended use.

The same commitment extends to the people making decisions within those systems. Independent exercise and wargaming practice keeps me focused on commanders’ decisions, coordination across organizations and operational demands. At PALLC, we connect engineering and test and evaluation with live, virtual and constructive integration, exercises and analytical wargaming.