Conference Co-Chairs

Nate Bastian

United States Military Academy

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Nathaniel D. Bastian, PhD is a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army, where he is an Academy Professor and Cyber Warfare officer at the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point, as well as a Program Manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). At USMA, Nate serves as Division Chief, Data & Decision Sciences and Senior Research Scientist at the Army Cyber Institute (ACI) within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He also serves on the Faculty at USMA focused on operations research, data science, artificial intelligence, and systems engineering with a dual appointment in the Department of Systems Engineering and the Department of Mathematical Sciences. At DARPA, Nate serves in the Information Innovation Office (I2O) developing, executing, and transitioning research and development programs in artificial intelligence and cyber operations.

Robert Dell

University of Buffalo

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Dr. Robert F. Dell joined the University at Buffalo as Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering in the Fall of 2022. He previously served on the faculty of the Operations Research (OR) Department at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). His NPS leadership roles included Acting Provost from March 2020 to March 2021, Dean of the NPS Graduate School of Operational and Information Sciences from 2019 to March 2022 (excluding time as Acting Provost), Executive Director of the NPS Data Science and Analytics Group from 2018 to 2022, and Chair of the OR Department from 2009 to 2015. During his tenure as Chair the department received the 2013 INFORMS Smith Prize. He served as editor-in-chief of the Military Operations Research Journal from 2015 to 2018. Professor Dell has received millions of dollars of reimbursable research awarded by the uniformed services, department of defense organizations, and intelligence agencies. He has also applied optimization in the private sector in areas including production scheduling, supply chain design, and professional sports analytics. He has deployed twice to combat zones. Professor Dell has been awarded the Barchi, Koopman, Rist, and Wanner prizes for military operations research. He has also received two Brazilian Navy awards (the Order of Naval Merit and the Tamandaré Merit Medal), two Department of the Army Payne Memorial Awards for Excellence in Analysis, and two Department of the Navy Superior Civilian Service Awards.

Track Coordinators

Panel Session

Dave Alderson

Naval Postgraduate School

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Poster Session

Nathan Gaw

Air Force Institute of Technology

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Dr. Nathan Gaw is an Assistant Professor of Data Science in the Department of Operational Sciences at Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, USA. His research develops new statistical machine learning algorithms to optimally fuse high-dimensional, heterogeneous, multi-modality data sources to support decision making in military, healthcare and remote sensing. He received his B.S.E. and M.S. in biomedical engineering and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe, AZ, USA, in 2013, 2014, and 2019, respectively. Dr. Gaw was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the ASU-Mayo Clinic Center for Innovative Imaging (AMCII), Tempe, AZ, USA, from 2019-2020, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, from 2020-2021. He is also chair of the INFORMS Data Mining Society, and a member of IISE and IEEE. For additional information, please visit www.nathanbgaw.com.

Homeland Defense

Kyle Hunt

University of Buffalo

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Dr. Kyle Hunt is an Assistant Professor of Management Science and Systems in the School of Management at the University at Buffalo (UB). He completed his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering with a concentration in operations research at UB in 2023. Dr. Hunt’s research focuses on applications of operations research and machine learning in security/defense, healthcare, and information management. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He is widely published in leading journals such as Decision Support Systems, European Journal of Operational Research, Decision Analysis, Risk Analysis, and Reliability Engineering and System Safety, among others.

National Security

Tony Zech

ECS Tech

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Tony Zech is the Director of Data and AI at ECS. Tony Zech oversees Data and AI at ECS to support ECS’s many customers.

Previously at ECS he oversaw cyber analytics and architectures to secure customer environments in defense, government, and the private sector as well as leading ECS’s Data and AI Community of Excellence.

Before joining ECS, Mr. Zech worked as a Systems Engineer at Forescout Technologies in the Operational Technologies (OT) Business Unit. In this role, Mr. Zech helped organizations secure critical cyber assets at the heart of their missions. Prior to Forescout, Mr. Zech worked at Cargill, a major agricultural manufacturer, leading analytics, and orchestration for the Cargill Security Operations Center.

Tony served as an active-duty U.S. Marine Officer in intelligence and cybersecurity, deploying in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, and other operations in the Middle East. He continues to serve as a Marine Corps Reservist. In this capacity he has served on the Joint Staff as the Reserve Deputy Director for Collection Management (J26) and continues to serve as a Data and AI Line of Operation Lead for the Marine Innovation Unit.

Tony holds a Bachelor of Science in International Relations from the United States Naval Academy and a Master of Science in Business Analytics from the University of Minnesota.

Medical, Health and Humanitarian Assistance

Hyojung Kang

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Dr. Hyojung Kang is an assistant professor in the college of Applied Health Sciences at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Her research focuses on developing AI and simulation models, aiming to investigate the behaviors and outcomes of individuals with chronic conditions as well as enhance the overall efficiency of healthcare delivery systems. Her research also strives to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion by examining racial/ethnic and geographic disparities in care and identifying individual and socioeconomic factors woven into these disparities. Her current work includes evaluating the efficiency of preventive care for diabetes, predicting medication adherence behaviors, and evaluating temporal-spatial patterns of substance use/misuse. These research projects have been funded by the state and federal agencies. Her research has involved multi-disciplinary team collaboration to incorporate intimate knowledge of problems with quantitative models and provide solutions implementable in practice.

Data, Artificial Intelligence
and Cyber

Ankit Shah

University of South Florida

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Ankit Shah is an Assistant Professor of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering at the University of South Florida (USF). He also holds appointments as Affiliate Assistant Professor in USF’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering departments. Dr. Shah is the director of the Artificial Intelligence Research (AIR) Laboratory for Secure and Efficient Systems and a member of the USF Institute for Artificial Intelligence + X (AI+X). Before joining USF, he was a researcher in the field of Reinforcement Learning at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in CA and the Center for Secure Information Systems in VA. With over nine years of industry experience in the Information Technology and Security sector, he has held diverse positions, ranging from a software engineer to the executive role of Vice President. Dr. Shah’s research interests revolve around the convergence of Computer Science, Operations Research, Data Science, and Information Technology, with a strong focus on Artificial Intelligence for Cybersecurity. His methodological research is in deep reinforcement learning and adversarial machine learning for threat reduction and enhancing system security.

Supply Chain, Energy and Transportation

Isabella Sanders