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Committee and Staff Biographical Information

COMMITTEE

GEORGE T. LIGLER, Chair, is the proprietor of GTL Associates, which provides systems integration/engineering and product management services related to telecommunications, computer system and hardware/software engineering, and information management to domestic and foreign customers. Dr. Ligler has worked as a subject matter expert to support the Federal Aviation Administration’s implementation of both satellite-based navigation and Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) as components of the Next Generation Air Transportation System. Dr. Ligler is a member of the RTCA Program Management Committee, the RTCA NextGen Advisory Committee Subcommittee, and the Plenary leadership group for the Industry-FAA Equip 2020 initiative related to ADS-B out equipage. Dr. Ligler is co-chair of RTCA Special Committee-159 (Navigation Equipment Using the Global Navigation Satellite System) and a former founding co-chair of RTCA Special Committee-228 (Minimum Operational Performance Standards for Unmanned Aircraft Systems). He has also been active in RTCA Special Committee-186 (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast) since its inception in 1995. Dr. Ligler was awarded the 2006 RTCA Achievement Award, RTCA’s highest award, for his contributions to ADS-B and satellite-based navigation system initiatives. He is also a co-recipient of the 2016 RTCA Achievement Award for his contributions to the development of standards for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). Dr. Ligler holds a D. Phil. in computer science from Oxford University, with his studies supported by a Rhodes scholarship. He is a member of the National Academies’ Standing Committee on Reengineering Census Operations, and he has served on four other National Academies’ panels, most recently the Committee on National Statistics Panel to Review the 2010 Census.

BRIAN M. ARGROW is chair of Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences, director of the Integrated Remote and In Situ Sensing Program, and director emeritus of the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles at the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU). Dr. Argrow has served as associate dean for education and is a CU president’s teaching scholar. His research topics include small UAS design and airspace integration, high-speed aerodynamics, sonic boom, and engineering education, with more than 100 research publications. He is a fellow of the Center for STEM Learning and a recipient of the W.M. Keck Foundation Award for Excellence in Engineering Education. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and is a past chair of the AIAA Unmanned Systems Program Committee, and he organized/chaired the first major joint events by the AIAA and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems: the 2nd and 3rd Workshops on Civilian Applications of Unmanned Aircraft Systems. He served on the NASA Advisory Council UAS Subcommittee and

several other NASA and NOAA advisory boards and committees. Dr. Argrow currently serves on the ASTM F38 Subcommittee for Specifications for UAS Operations over People. Dr. Argrow is an alumnus of the DARPA/IDA Defense Science Study Group, and he received the Air Force Exemplary Civilian Service Award for his service on the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. He has a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Oklahoma. He is a member of the National Academies’ Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board and the Aviation Safety Assurance Committee.

GREGORY B. BAECHER is the Glenn L. Martin Institute Professor of Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Baecher is a civil engineer with 40 years’ experience specializing in risk and reliability of civil infrastructure, with emphasis on water resource development, dam and levee safety, hydropower, and coastal protection. He is the author of five books on risk, safety, and the protection of civil infrastructure. He is a recipient of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Commander’s Award for Public Service for his contributions to the levee system risk analysis of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and of the Panamanian National Award for Science and Technology Innovation for his contributions to enterprise risk management at the Panama Canal. Dr. Baecher earned his Ph.D. in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has served on many National Academies’ committees and boards, most recently as chair of the Committee on Long-Term Management of the Spirit Lake/Toutle River System in Southwest Washington; as a member of the Committee on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Water Resources, Science, Engineering, and Planning; and as chair of the Committee on the Updated Site-Specific Risk Assessment for the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan, Kansas.

STEPHEN P. COOK is a Northrop Grumman Technical Fellow in Airworthiness at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems. Dr. Cook is responsible for developing and implementing airworthiness policy and strategy across Northrop Grumman’s portfolio of manned and unmanned aircraft programs. Additionally, Dr. Cook is leading the Remotely Piloted Aircraft Airworthiness subgroup at the International Civil Aviation Organization Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) Panel. This group is charged with the development of standards and recommended practices needed for RPAS to integrate into international airspace. Previously, Dr. Cook was principal safety engineer in the Navigation and Unmanned Aircraft Systems Department at the MITRE Corporation. In this role he supported multiple efforts to integrate civil and military aircraft into the National Airspace System. He co-led the UAS Sense-and-Avoid Science and Research Panel (SARP), a multi-agency organization charged with identifying key research gaps associated with integrating UAS into the National Airspace System. A key output of the SARP was a risk-based recommended definition for UAS “well clear” to enable UAS to comply with the rules of the air. This UAS “well clear” recommendation informed the work of RTCA Special Committee-228 on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, leading to the publication of Minimum Operational Performance Standards for UAS Detect and Avoid. Before coming to MITRE Dr. Cook served as the head of the UAS Division of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Airworthiness Directorate. In this position he was responsible for airworthiness policy and flight clearance approvals for all Navy and Marine Corps UAS. He also represented the United States in the development of NATO STANAG 4671, the first airworthiness standard developed specifically for fixed wing unmanned aircraft. His research interests include novel risk assessment approaches for UAS and methods to safely bound the flight behavior of UAS containing complex adaptive algorithms. Dr. Cook has completed formal training in the FAA Safety Management System and the U.S. Navy Test Pilot School UAS Flight Test Procedures and Practices Short Course, where he logged UAS flight time. He has been appointed an adjunct visiting professor on the faculty of North Carolina State University. Dr. Cook is an associate fellow of the AIAA. Earlier this year he received the Engineers’ Council Distinguished Engineering Project Achievement Award for leading the development of a first-in-the-nation graduate program in airworthiness, in partnership with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. At MITRE he was awarded the Director’s Award for innovative safety risk analyses and simulations in support of the UAS Limited Deployment—Cooperative Airspace Project flight tests. Dr. Cook earned his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland.

LOUIS ANTHONY COX, JR. is president of Cox Associates, an applied research company specializing in quantitative health risk assessment, causal modeling, probabilistic and statistical risk analysis, data mining, and operations

research. Since 1986, Cox Associates mathematicians and scientists have developed and applied computer simulation and biomathematical models, statistical and epidemiological risk analyses, causal data mining techniques, and operations research and artificial intelligence risk models to improve health, business, and engineering risk analysis and decision making. Dr. Cox is on the faculties of the Center for Computational Mathematics and the Center for Computational Biology at the University of Colorado, Denver, and is clinical professor of biostatistics and informatics at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, where he has focused on uncertainty analysis and causation in epidemiological studies. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering based on his application of operations research and risk analysis to significant national problems. He earned a Ph.D. in risk analysis from MIT. Dr. Cox has served on many National Academies’ committees, most recently as a member of the Committee for a Study of Performance-Based Safety Regulation and the Industrial, Manufacturing and Operational Systems Engineering Peer Committee. He is also a former member of the Board on Mathematical Sciences and Analytics.

LETICIA CUELLAR-HENGARTNER is a statistician in the Information Systems and Modeling group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Dr. Cuellar has worked in various groups at LANL since 2006, including Discrete Simulations Sciences, Information Sciences, Risk Analysis and Decision Support Systems, and Intelligence and System Analysis. She has expertise in statistics, stochastic modeling, machine learning, and model validation. Her work at LANL includes modeling of critical infrastructure protection, telecommunication systems and networks, transportation networks, disaster response modeling, modeling illegal trafficking of nuclear materials, and methods development enabling soft cosmic ray tomography. These projects used stochastic modeling, agent-based simulations, modeling of human activity and behavior, graph theory and network analysis, and Bayesian networks. Dr. Cuellar is the principal investigator (PI) for an Ernst & Young-founded project that focuses on developing forecasting models for quality. She is also the PI on the Probabilistic Effectiveness Methodology project, which performs probabilistic risk assessment of nuclear smuggling. She is the recipient of the 2012 Distinguished Performance Award and the 2011 Los Alamos Award Program from LANL. Dr. Cuellar earned her master’s and Ph.D. in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley.

MARGARET T. JENNY is the president of RTCA, Inc., a private, not-for-profit corporation dedicated to the forging of wide-ranging consensus-based recommendations in aviation policy, technology, and modernization. Prior to joining RTCA, Ms. Jenny served as chief executive officer of MJF Strategies, LLC, an aviation consulting firm; vice president of corporate business development at ARINC; director of airline business and operations analysis for US Airways; and technical director at the MITRE Corporation. Ms. Jenny has devoted her career to helping diverse and competing stakeholders find common ground to expedite the continual modernization of the national airspace. She has served as the 2016 president of the Aero Club of Washington. Ms. Jenny earned her M.S. in computer science from American University. She has been a member of the National Academies’ Committee on the Federal Transportation R&D Strategic Planning Process; the Committee on Review of the National Transportation Science and Technology Strategy; and the Aeronautics Research and Technology Roundtable.

ANDREW R. LACHER is a senior principal at the MITRE Corporation and has over 30 years of systems engineering experience, mostly in the aviation and transportation systems domain. Mr. Lacher currently has a leadership role in defining MITRE’s research strategy in unmanned and autonomous systems. Previously, he worked as a product manager for Orbcomm and was a strategic information technology consultant working with small airlines. Mr. Lacher is focused on the safe and secure integration of UAS in civil airspace as well as methods to calibrate the trustworthiness of autonomous systems. He helps manage a research portfolio that includes research into a risk-based approach to certification for UAS, UAS safety technologies, human-machine teaming, safety of autonomous systems, and counter-UAS detection and defeat technologies. Much of Mr. Lacher’s research and analysis activities involve improving the safety, security, and efficiency of aviation operations through the application of new information technologies. Mr. Lacher worked on the definition of NextGen as part of the Joint Program and Development Office and was a thought leader in development of future Traffic Flow Management concepts including Collaborative Decision-Making. Mr. Lacher serves on a number of committees, standards working groups,

and external research advisory panels. He currently serves on the FAA’s Research, Engineering, and Development Advisory Committee for Aircraft Safety and the FAA’s UAS ID and Tracking Aviation Rulemaking Committee. Mr. Lacher earned an M.S. in operations research at the George Washington University. He was a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Autonomy Research for Civil Aviation; the Aeronautics Research and Technology Roundtable; and Panel E: Intelligent and Autonomous Systems, Operations and Decision-Making, Human Integrated Systems, Networking, and Communications for the Decadal Survey of Civil Aeronautics.

KAREN MARAIS is an associate professor in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics in the College of Engineering at Purdue University. Previously, Dr. Marais was on the faculty of Stellenbosch University (South Africa) in the Department of Industrial Engineering. She also held a postdoctoral appointment at MIT working with the FAA’s PARTNER Center of Excellence. Prior to graduate school she worked as an electronic engineer in the aerospace industry in South Africa. Dr. Marais has worked on developing new ways of assessing safety and risk in complex sociotechnical systems in general, and air transportation systems in particular. Her research interests include modeling and mitigating aviation environmental impacts, improving aviation safety, and developing improved approaches to the engineering of complex systems. Recently, Dr. Marais has investigated ways of improving the success rates of systems engineering projects (through a National Science Foundation [NSF] CAREER grant) and using flight and accident/incident data to improve fixed wing and rotorcraft safety (through the FAA PEGASAS Center of Excellence). She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award. Dr. Marais earned her Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from MIT. She served as a member of the National Academies’ Committee on Propulsion and Energy Systems to Reduce Commercial Aviation Carbon Emissions.

PAUL E. McDUFFEE is vice president of government relations at Insitu, Inc., where he is responsible for regulation shaping and development supporting Insitu’s future in civilian and commercial use of unmanned aircraft. Mr. McDuffee serves as principal liaison with the FAA in matters relating to regulation of UAS operations and as an advocate for UAS national airspace integration. His involvement in UAS regulatory development is extensive. Prior to joining Insitu in 2006, he transitioned from a 30-year career in academia as a full professor and vice president of aviation training at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He joined Insitu as vice president of flight operations and training before moving on to his current role. He currently serves on the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) board of directors and is also AUVSI’s technical representative to the International Civil Aviation Organization Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems Panel. He was a charter member of the FAA’s Small Unmanned Aircraft System Aviation Rulemaking Committee and former member of the FAA UAS Aviation Rulemaking Committee. He was the working group chair on ASTM’s F-38 Committee developing industry consensus standards for small UAS, and he is currently serving as co-chair of RTCA Special Committee-228 chartered by the FAA to establish performance standards for UAS command and control and detect and avoid solutions. Mr. McDuffee is a recipient of the RTCA 2017 Achievement Award and received three Outstanding Leader Awards from RTCA, is a member of the FAA/RTCA Drone Advisory Committee Subcommittee and a member of the FAA Unmanned Aircraft Safety Team Steering Committee, and has recently ended his second term as chair of the Aeronautical Industries Association UAS Committee. He is an active pilot, holding airline transport pilot and flight instructor certificates, with jet-type ratings, and he has logged more than 9,000 flight hours. He earned an M.S. in aeronautical science from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

AMY R. PRITCHETT is a professor and head of the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. Previously, Dr. Pritchett was on the faculty of the Schools of Aerospace Engineering and Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and she served via the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) as the director of NASA’s Aviation Safety Program for 2 years. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology, expert human performance, and aerospace operations, with a particular focus on designing to support safety. She is currently editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making. Dr. Pritchett has received the AIAA Lawrence Sperry Award, the RTCA William Jackson Award, and, as a member of the Executive Committee of the Commercial Aviation Safety Team, the 2008 Collier Trophy. She earned her Sc.D., S.M., and S.B. in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT. She has served on many National Academies’

committees, most recently as a member of the Committee of the Federal Aviation Administration Research Plan on Certification of New Technologies into the National Airspace System, chair of the Committee for a Study of FAA Air Traffic Controller Staffing, and member of the Committee on Human Spaceflight Crew Operations.

AGAM N. SINHA is the president of ANS Aviation International, LLC. Dr. Sinha retired from the MITRE Corporation in 2012 where he was a senior vice president, as well as general manager of the Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD). He also directed the FAA Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC). CAASD supports the FAA, the Transportation Security Administration, and international civil aviation authorities in addressing operational and technical challenges to meet aviation’s capacity, efficiency, safety, and security needs. Dr. Sinha has over 40 years of experience in aviation and weather systems. He serves on the board of trustees of Vaughn College of Aeronautics in New York and is on the advisory board of the Ph.D. in Aviation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He also served as a member of the FAA NextGen Advisory Committee and the FAA Research, Engineering, and Development Advisory Committee. He was elected chair of the RTCA Board of Directors and the RTCA Policy Board. He was an elected member of the RTCA Policy Board, Air Traffic Management Advisory Committee, and Air Traffic Management Steering Group. In the past, he served on the advisory committee of the Lincoln Lab at MIT and of the National Center of Atmospheric Research (Research Applications Programs). He is an associate fellow of the AIAA. He has over 80 publications and has been an invited presenter to a wide range of organizations nationally and internationally. Dr. Sinha is the recipient of several awards and citations from the FAA and industry. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Sinha is a member of the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board, a former member of the Committee of the Federal Aviation Administration Research Plan on Certification of New Technologies into the National Airspace System, and a former chair of the Aviation Group of the Transportation Research Board.

KAREN E. WILLCOX is a professor of aerospace engineering in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and co-director of the Center for Computational Engineering at MIT. At MIT, Dr. Willcox leads a research program that is developing the mathematical foundations and computational methods to enable design of the next generation of aerospace vehicles. Before joining the faculty at MIT, she worked at Boeing Phantom Works with the Blended-Wing-Body aircraft design group. She has also held a visiting scientist position at Sandia National Laboratories. Her current research specifically targets the design challenges and opportunities offered by new sensing technologies, increased onboard computation power, and increasing levels of autonomy. Modeling the data-to-decisions flow is key to enabling new approaches for vehicle design and operation. Dr. Willcox’s data-to-decisions modeling methods have two key underpinnings: (1) exploiting the synergies between physics-based models and data and (2) explicit modeling and treatment of uncertainty. She earned her Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from MIT. She is a member of the Board on Mathematical Sciences and Analytics; she was a member of the Committee to Conduct an Independent Assessment of the Nation’s Wake Turbulence Research and Development Program; and she was a member of the Decadal Survey of Civil Aeronautics, Aerodynamics, and Acoustics Panel.

CRAIG A. WOOLSEY is a professor in the Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech (VT). Dr. Woolsey directs the VT site within the Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS), an NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC). Dr. Woolsey’s research and teaching interests include nonlinear control theory for mechanical systems, particularly energy-based control methods, and applications to ocean and atmospheric vehicles. His primary research focus is the development and validation of control methods that improve the performance and robustness of autonomous vehicles. Soon after joining VT, Dr. Woolsey received the NSF CAREER Award and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award. He earned his Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University.

STAFF

DWAYNE A. DAY, Study Director, a senior program officer for the ASEB, has a Ph.D. in political science from the George Washington University. Dr. Day joined the National Academies as a program officer for SSB. He served

as an investigator for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003, was on the staff of the Congressional Budget Office, and worked for the Space Policy Institute at the George Washington University. He has also performed consulting for the Science and Technology Policy Institute of the Institute for Defense Analyses and for the U.S. Air Force. He is the author of Lightning Rod: A History of the Air Force Chief Scientist and editor of several books, including a history of the CORONA reconnaissance satellite program. He has held Guggenheim and Verville fellowships at the National Air and Space Museum and was an associate editor of the German spaceflight magazine Raumfahrt Concrete, in addition to writing for such publications as Novosti Kosmonavtiki (Russia), Spaceflight, Space Chronicle (United Kingdom), and the Washington Post. He has served as study director for over a dozen National Academies’ reports, including Visions into Voyages for Planetary Sciences in the Decade 2013-2022: A Midterm Review (2018), Testing at the Speed of Light—The State of U.S. Electronic Parts Space Radiation Testing Infrastructure (2018), Powering Science—NASA’s Large Strategic Science Missions (2017), Extending Science—NASA’s Space Science Mission Extensions and the Senior Review Process (2016), 3-D Printing in Space (2013), NASA’s Strategic Direction and the Need for a National Consensus (2012), Vision and Voyages for Planetary Science in the Decade 2013-2022 (2011), Preparing for the High Frontier—The Role and Training of NASA Astronauts in the Post-Space Shuttle Era (2011), Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies (2010), Grading NASA’s Solar System Exploration Program: A Midterm Review (2008), and Opening New Frontiers in Space: Choices for the Next New Frontiers Announcement of Opportunity (2008).