Leadership
Sorin Adam Matei, Founding Executive Director
Sorin Adam Matei, PhD, is Asst. Vice President, Partnerships in Strategic Defense Innovation. He is the founder of the FORCES initiative, the academic lead of the MS in Strategy for Security and Defense Technologies, and a professor of communication at the Brian Lamb School of Communication. He has a master's degree in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and a PhD in communication research from The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. His research examines the role of technology in influencing outcomes on a global scale with a focus on defense and security applications. He is the author of numerous academic publications and books and designs strategic initiatives to build capacity in the social sciences with defense implications. His interests cover computational social science, global online models of human interaction, and the nexus between technology, strategy, and warfare. His latest work looks at space-time analytics of military operations and AI applications in command and control.
Resources
- http://matei.org/
- Amazon.com author page
- https://www.cla.purdue.edu/directory/profiles/sorin-adam-matei.html
Jonathan Poggie, Director of Military Analytics and Computational Conflict Dynamics
Jonathan Poggie, PhD, is FORCES’ director of military analytics and computational conflict dynamics. As a professor in Purdue’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, he is the innovation lead for hypersonics at Purdue’s Institute for Global Security and Defense Innovation. He received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Rhode Island, and his doctorate in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University. He has a unique breadth of experience, with research publications in the computational, theoretical, and experimental aspects of fluid and plasma dynamics. More recently, Poggie has pursued the idea of flow in a more abstract sense, to provide leaders in military conflicts and civilian crises a human manageable perspective of overwhelming situational data. For twenty years prior to coming to Purdue, he worked as a research engineer and program manager at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. He is a fellow of the American Society for Mechanical Engineers and an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Resources
Robert Kirchubel, Outreach Operations Director and Historian
Robert Kirchubel, PhD, is the outreach operations director of the FORCES initiative and the FORCES history research expert teaching the core class for the MS in Strategy for Security and Defense Technologies, SCLA 50500, Technology, War, and Strategy. He earned his PhD in modern European history at Purdue and is a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served across 18 time zones as an armor officer during the Cold War. A military historian specializing in the 20th-century German military, Kirchubel is the author of numerous and acclaimed books and articles on World War II, including the definitive Atlas of the Eastern Front. His current research and writing projects include the operational-level history of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, in collaboration with Dr. Matei.
Resources