MORS-Talk

Ms. Kristina M. O’Brien was appointed to the Senior Executive Service on November 12, 2019 as Principal Deputy Director for Logistics, Joint Staff, The Pentagon, Washington D.C. In this role she supports the Director for Logistics, J4 in integrating logistics planning and execution in support of global operations to drive joint force readiness, maximize the Joint Force Commander's freedom of action and advise the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on logistics matters.

Dr. Ralph D. Semmel became the eighth director of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory on July 1, 2010. As director, Dr. Semmel leads the nation’s largest university affiliated research center, which performs research and development on behalf of the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other federal agencies. The Laboratory has almost 8,000 staff members who are making critical contributions to a wide variety of nationally and globally significant technical and scientific challenges.

Author of The Art of Wargaming and Internationally Recognized Game Designer

Dr. Peter P. Perla III has been involved with wargaming, both hobby and professional, for over forty years, an involvement that sparked a lifelong interest in military history and games of strategy. A frequent player of commercial wargames as a youngster, he had already published articles in the hobby press before he was an undergraduate. After earning a PhD from Carnegie-Mellon University with his thesis on Lanchester mathematical combat models, he joined the Center for Naval Analyses in 1977 as a naval operations research analyst.

Adjunct Senior Fellow, Center for New American Security
Instructor and Course Coordinator on Gaming, Military Operations Research Society
Principal, MonksHood Media LLC

Dr. Ed McGrady writes, speaks, and teaches on the design of professional games. He is an adjunct senior fellow in the Gaming Lab at CNAS, teaches and manages game design courses for MORS/Virginia Tech, and runs a business devoted to using games and game techniques to bring innovative experiences in new areas. In the past, Dr. McGrady built and directed a team of 10-20 analysts at CNA devoted to the design and execution of professional games devoted to chemical and biological response operations, including domestic response operations. His team constructed exercises, games, and analyses on a broad range of homeland security, counterterrorism, and chemical, biological, and radiological defense operations. As part of that effort, he deployed analysts in support of the analyses of real-world events. Dr . McGrady also deployed as an analyst with US Forces in Haiti during operation Uphold Democracy, onboard USS Nimitz for Desert Storm and with operational E-2C squadrons.

Dr. McGrady holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan and has published extensively in the Chemical Engineering, physics, and national security literature and is the author of Roll to Save: Gaming Disease Response (2021).

Norton A. Schwartz serves as President 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.

Neil Johnson is a professor of physics at GW and heads up a new initiative in Complexity and Data Science which combines cross-disciplinary fundamental research with data science to attack complex real-world problems. His research interests lie in the broad area of Complex Systems and ‘many-body’ out-of-equilibrium systems of collections of objects, ranging from crowds of particles to crowds of people and from environments as distinct as quantum information processing in nanostructures through to the online world of collective behavior on social media.