Dr. Chid Apte,
Chair of IBM Research Mathematical Sciences Council

Dr. Chid Apte is Chair of the Mathematical Sciences Council in the IBM Research Division, at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, USA. He has over three decades of experience as a Research Scientist and Manager/Executive in areas related to Data Science. In his current role, he oversees the strategy and agenda in IBM Research for it’s exploratory long-term Mathematical Sciences research area, covering Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science. Chid received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Rutgers University, and B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (Bombay).

Dr. Banavar Sridhar,
Research Associate at NASA Ames Research Center

Dr. Banavar Sridhar is a Research Associate at the NASA Ames Research Center. Earlier he served as the NASA Senior Scientist for Air Transportation Systems. His research interests are in the application of modeling and optimization techniques to aerospace systems. He has authored more than 200 publications in the areas of Air Transportation, Optimization, Data Analytics, Neural Networks, Automated Helicopter Guidance and Control Systems. Dr. Sridhar received the 2004 IEEE Control System Technology Award for his contributions to the development of modeling and simulation techniques for multi-vehicle traffic networks. He led the development of traffic flow management software, Future ATM Concepts Evaluation Tool (FACET), which received the AIAA Engineering Software Award in 2009, the NASA Invention of the Year Award in 2010 and the FAA Award for the Excellence in Aviation Research in 2010. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the AIAA.

Lou Gullo,
JPL NASA

Lou Gullo worked for Raytheon Missile Systems (RMS), Whole Life System Engineering (WLSE) Directorate, Reliability Department, which is located in Tucson, AZ. He was leading several Corporate and RMS projects, such as the Rocket Motor and Energetics Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) IR&D research project, the WLSE Health Monitoring Sensor research project, and Life Cycle Engineering Council (LCEC) Software Reliability project. He retired fromm Raytheon Missile Systems in April 2019, and now works for JPNL NASA as of January 2020. He has over 30 years of experience in military, space and commercial electronic systems programs. He previously worked for Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems, Honeywell, Texas Instruments, Flextronics, Tyco/Sensormatic, and the US Army. He is a retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel. Lou has a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Connecticut in 1980. He is an IEEE Senior Member, and appointed as the IEEE RS Standards Committee Chair.

Dr. Heinz Erzberger,
Senior Scientist at Universities Space Research Association

Heinz Erzberger worked at the NASA Ames as a Senior Scientist for Air Traffic Management until his retirement in 2006. After retiring from NASA, he joined the University of California, Santa Cruz, as an adjunct professor of Electrical Engineering, where he conducted research on autonomous air traffic management systems with support from NASA. He is currently employed with the Universities Space Research Association as a senior scientist, where he continues his research on autonomous systems under a NASA support contract. He also holds the position of adjunct professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. He has published over 120 papers on control theory, trajectory optimization and automated methods for air traffic management. He holds several patents for controller advisory tools. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and a Fellow of Ames Research Center. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2010.

Roger Mandeville,
Subject Matter Expert at ATAC Corporation

Roger Mandeville is a retired Manager/Air Traffic Controller from the Federal Aviation Administration.  He has 36 years of ATC experience with certifications in all four ATC Operational Disciplines (Control Tower Operator, Radar Approach Controller, En-route Controller, Supervisor/Manager and Air Traffic Control System Command Center, National Operations Manager). He is currently a subject matter expert with ATAC Corporation providing support for air traffic simulation, modeling, analysis and next-gen technology development. 

Peter Kostiuk,
President of Robust Analytics

Peter Kostiuk is the founder and president of Robust Analytics, a woman-owned small business that specializes in R&D for air traffic management and aviation safety. Among his current projects, he is working with NASA on the development of a real-time terminal area safety margin monitoring system and speech-to-text applications for aviation. He has worked in aviation R&D for over 25 years, and previously held positions with Logistics Management Institute, CNA Corporation, and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.

Dr. Habib Fathi,
CTO and Co-founder of Pointivo

Dr. Habib Fathi received his  PhD  in  Civil Engineering  with  concentration  in  Computer  Vision and Machine Learning from Georgia Tech in 2013. He currently serves as CTO and Co-founder of Pointivo. His achievements  have  been  recognized  both  in  academia  and  industry  where  he  has  received  a number  of  prestigious  awards  including  NSF  CMMI  Graduate  Student  Fellowship  (2011  and 2012), CETI Award for Intelligent & Automated Construction Job Site at the Fiatech Technology Conference  &  Showcase  (2012),  and  Charles  M.  Eastman  Top  PhD  Paper  Award  at  the Computing in Civil Engineering and Building Engineering Conference (2014).

Jon Rein,
FAA William J. Hughes Technical Center – Aviation Research

Jon Rein is a research psychologist and data scientist with the FAA’s research division.  His previous work has primarily involved the development of automation tools and the evaluation of human-automation system performance in air traffic management, unmanned aircraft systems, and aviation security.  He currently focuses on large-scale data analysis of air traffic operations and developing speech recognition tools for air traffic simulation.

Christina M. Young,
Project Lead and Industrial Engineer for Federal Aviation Administration

Dr. Christina M. Young is a project lead and industrial engineer for the Federal Aviation Administration in the Modeling & Simulation branch under the NextGen organization. She has worked at the William J. Hughes Technical Center since 2010 on research projects involving fast-time simulation, experimental design, metric development, and statistical data analysis.  She has also authored numerous journal articles and conference papers, and is heavily involved in STEM outreach.  Dr. Young first started working on FAA research projects as a graduate student at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She earned the M.S. degree in Statistics and the Ph.D. degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering while serving as a Graduate Research Assistant under a Rutgers-FAA graduate fellowship grant.

Somil Shah,
Aerospace Engineer, Aviation Research Division at FAA William J. Hughes Technical Center

Somil Shah joined the FAA William J. Hughes Technical Center directly out of college in the summer of 2017, and serves as an aerospace engineer within the Aviation Research Division. Born and raised in New Hampshire, he received his BS and MS degrees in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Prior to starting work at the FAA, he worked at the Aerospace Systems Design Lab at Georgia Tech as a graduate research assistant, where he took classes and worked on projects in the areas of systems engineering, design optimization, modeling and simulation, and system safety. At the FAA Technical Center, Somil’s primary work revolves around investigating the braking capability of aircraft landing on wet runways in order to prevent runway overruns, and also supports projects related to the determination of unstable approach criteria, evaluation of the effectiveness of angle-of-attack indicators in stall recovery, and go-around safety for commercial airliners. Finally, he also holds a private pilot license.

Andrew Lacher,
Senior Manager Autonomous Systems Integration Boeing NeXt

Andrew Lacher has over 30 years of systems engineering experience, mostly in the aviation and transportation systems domain. He currently has a leadership role in helping to define the path towards safe and routine integration of unmanned and autonomous aircraft working across Boeing’s enterprise. He recently retired, after 30 years, from The MITRE Corporation, where he helped shape research associated with unmanned and autonomous systems. He was focused on the safe and secure integration of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) in civil airspace, as well as methods to calibrate the trustworthiness of autonomous systems.  He was also involved with efforts to mitigation the threat posed by unauthorized UAS operations.  

Dr. Ping Xue,
Senior Research Scientist at Boeing Research & Technology

Dr. Xue is a retired senior research scientist at Boeing Research and Technology. During his 20 years career at Boeing, he worked on a variety of language processing areas for aerospace applications including grammar engineering, text processing, lexical and semantic resources as well as technical terminology management and standardization. He has extensive experiences in natural language and human-machine interface, data modeling, information integration and intelligent knowledge systems. Since his retirement in 2016, Ping has been working as a consultant for a natural language processing project at the Center for Study of Language and Information, Stanford University.

John Schade,
Vice President of Research and Product Development at ATAC

John Schade has been with ATAC Corporation for 18+ years and prior to that was engaged as an Aerospace Engineer at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for 5 years where he participated in numerous major aviation accident investigations.  Currently John is the Vice President of Research and Product Development at ATAC managing key technology development efforts in the areas of application development, system engineering, web design, database development and implementation, algorithmic development, metric development, and IT infrastructure procurement and cloud deployment.  In addition, John has extensive experience with systems supporting the analysis of air-traffic surveillance data, digital flight recorder data, and performance measures for aviation systems including the FAA’s PDARS system and NASA’s Sherlock ATM data warehouse.