Mr. Scott Chambers

Mr. Scott Chambers has been wargaming professionally for over a decade, supporting a range of military, civilian federal, academic, and non-governmental organizations. His work has primarily been focused on strategic, pol-mil, and organizational gaming, with a strong interest on crisis management and strategy development. He has taught graduate level courses in wargaming and is involved in all elements of wargame design, development, and execution. Scott also helps coordinate the annual Connections U.S. Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference.

Lt Col James "Pigeon" Fielder, USAF (ret.)

James "Pigeon" Fielder joined Colorado State University as an instructor after retiring from the U.S. Air Force as a Lieutenant Colonel and Associate Professor of Political Science at the U.S. Air Force Academy. In academic years 2021-2023 he served as a Marine Corps University Non-Resident Krulak Fellow. He is currently the professional and educational gaming lead for Mobius Worlds Publishing and consults on organizational wargaming, crisis response exercises, and scenario planning.

Dr. Fielder researches interpersonal trust and emergent political processes through cyber-based interaction and through tabletop and live-action gaming as natural experiments and has over two decades of experience designing, executing, and assessing training exercises and wargames. Pigeon is on the editorial board of Simulation & Gaming and The MORS Journal of Wargaming, was a TEDx speaker, and has been interviewed on game-related topics by Reuters, USA Today, and NBC News.

Mr. Michael Markowitz

Mr. Michael Markowitz has over forty years of experience in design, development, production and evaluation of war games. He is a published writer and reviewer in military history and a regular contributor to Defense Media Network, StrategyPage.com and other publications. He also designs complex maps, charts and diagrams for CNA publications. He has won awards for his wargame designs, including the 1991 Charles Roberts Award and a 1995 Special Achievement Award by the Game Manufacturers Association.

Prior to joining CNA, Markowitz was a training specialist in the DIVAD Division of Ford Aerospace, an engineering writer at Hughes Aircraft Company, a computing engineer at McDonnell Douglas, and an electronic publication specialist at Systems Integration and Research, Inc.

Markowitz holds an M.A. in Social Ecology from the University of California at Irvine and a B.A. in History from the University of Rochester.

Dr. Ed McGrady

Dr. McGrady writes, speaks, and teaches on the design of professional games. He is an adjunct senior fellow in gaming 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. His recent book, Roll to Save: Gaming Disease Response, describes designing games in support of public health professionals.

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. Dr. McGrady wrote, taught, and presented on the topic of games and their use in organizational and individual learning. He designed and ran games for many different clients ranging from the White House to the Department of Agriculture to the automotive industry. Dr. McGrady also built a team at CNA devoted to chemical and biological response operations, including domestic response operations.

Dr. McGrady 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 PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan. He has published extensively in the chemical engineering, physics, and national security fields and is widely cited for his work on the mathematics of aggregation and fragmentation.

Mr. Phil Pournelle

After 26 Years in the Navy, and eight years conducting Net Assessments, Mr. Pournelle joined Group W. He constantly seeks to analyze national defense strategies and conduct Net Assessments employing multi-method approaches. Mr. Pournelle has extensive experience in analytic and managerial aspects of strategic studies within the national security apparatus. His national security experience includes expertise in contingency planning, wargaming, modeling, simulation, & analysis and assessment and he received his Master's degree from the Naval Postgraduate School in Operations Research.

Mr. Paul Vebber

Mr. Paul Vebber specializes in wargaming design, execution, and analysis, operations research, concept development and experimentation, philosophy, and the application of complexity science.

He has over 30 years of military operations, operations research, and wargaming experience in support of the development of an effective undersea warfare force through the disciplined application of both analytic and synthetic methods within the "Cycle of Research" (Perla 1990) framework.

He promotes research and development in wargaming design, implementation, and execution leveraging complimentary aspects of manual "hands on" kriegspiel-style wargaming with "virtual world" and other types of technology that can facilitate player communication and decision-making within the game while also communicating information about why those decisions were made to analysts.