Defense and Security

"Courage—Be Unafraid of the Impossible": Stu Shea Inspires Honors College Students

rstaffo2 — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 21:11:51 +0000

"Courage—Be Unafraid of the Impossible": Stu Shea Inspires Honors College Students rstaffo2 Mon, 02/03/2025 - 16:11

As the inaugural Honors College Executive-in-Residence, national security leader Stu Shea inspires inspires ��AV students to imagine the future.

Executive-in-Residence Stu Shea (center) meets with Honors College students. Photo provided

“In the Honors College, we imagine the future,” began Zofia Burr, dean of the Honors College, opening the first event of the Honors College Executive-in-Residence series.

Stu Shea, who retired from his role as president and CEO of Peraton in August 2024, serves as the Honors College’s inaugural Executive-in-Residence, inspiring Honors College students to ask: how might we imagine the future of national security?

Shea, who was George Mason's 2022 Spring Commencement speaker, began working with motivated Honors College students last fall. This month, Shea returned to campus, calling on students to imagine their own futures and aspirations, challenging them to go beyond what already seems possible and to orient themselves towards transformational career paths in national security.

Shea described his own journey into national security leadership in ways that inspired aspirational thinking, courage, and embracing the unknown.

“If you want to become a leader, follow the leaders.” —Stu Shea

From his early education studying geology through his early career in cutting edge cartography and computer-assisted intelligence, Shea was constantly building his skillset and the breadth of his knowledge: “Every time I did something, it piqued my interest in something else—and I did it,” said Shea, underscoring the importance to cultivating a lifelong “desire to learn.”

Honors College junior Avery Shippen, a conflict analysis and resolution major in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, observed: “Many of the opportunities he became involved in resulted from following a path based on his interests, rather than what was expected of him.”

Eventually, he explained, this habit of taking on the greatest challenges available enabled him to rise to the highest levels of the national security field. He shared stories drawn from his leadership at many of the national security companies and institutions that students aim to join, from Peraton to Leidos, SAIC, Northrop Grumman, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“I work really, really hard to understand what the problem is, to understand what’s available, and to not be afraid that the problem is not solvable. […] What I’d like to do in this dialogue is to tease out the things that challenge you most.”

—Stu Shea

Students shared with Shea the challenges they face pursuing their dreams, leading to a far-reaching conversation that touched on a range of important national security subjects, including contemporary cybersecurity in the era of AI, the balance between ubiquitous surveillance and civil liberties, the role of the United States and China in Africa, and the intersections between public diplomacy and education.

Shippen said that sharing aspirations and challenges was particularly valuable because Shea “constantly questioned why we felt the way we did,” encouraging participants to approach challenges and opportunities with an “open mindset.” One of Shea's key insights was that students should embrace their challenges—and even their failures.

"Failure is just a dry run for future success" —Stu Shea

Berk Kasimcan, an Honors College graduate in the accelerated MS in bioengineering, said students are especially receptive to programs like this because they are “eager to learn how to take the first steps toward making a meaningful impact.” He added that signature Honors College experiences like the Executive-in-Residence program help students become “more innovative and adaptable leaders.”

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Wargame Prepares Students for the Next International Security Crisis

Andrew J Schappert — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 20:07:18 +0000

Wargame Prepares Students for the Next International Security Crisis Andrew J Schappert Mon, 02/03/2025 - 15:07

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“When we decided to close the Suez Canal, everyone else in the room had to change their plans, especially the United States.”

George Mason alum Jerad Harper (far left), an associate professor at the U.S. Army War College, leads students in the Middle East crisis simulation. Photo provided

So commented one Schar School of Policy and Government student who represented Egypt during a Middle East crisis simulation hosted by ��AV’s Center for Security Policy Studies (CSPS).

One year after the beginning of fighting in Gaza, CSPS trained students to anticipate the next crisis and how countries might respond. This simulation, which took the form of a daylong matrix board game, was part of an annual series held by the Schar School, including a defense and security research forum and a Gettysburg battlefield tour.

“We offer these ‘out of the classroom’ opportunities,” said Ellen Laipson, director of CSPS and the school’s Master of International Security program, "because they help students move from conceptual thinking and scholarly writing to actually imagining what it would be like to operate in a crisis decision-making environment.”

Ellen Laipson, director of the Schar School’s Center for Security Policy Studies

Reflecting on her extensive career, which includes time as vice chair of the National Intelligence Council and on the staff of the National Security Council, Laipson believes that these simulations can help participants better understand what careers suit them.

“Some people are more suited to being the analyst, with deep knowledge of different world regions, or of specific political and military issues,” she said. “Others enjoy the ‘gaming’ of weighing different policy options; those who think more in terms of ‘now what do we do?’”

George Mason alumni Lee Roberts, PhD Political Science ‘22, an adjunct professor and U.S. Army strategic intelligence officer, and Jerad Harper, PhD Political Science ‘20, an associate professor at the U.S. Army War College, led the simulation in which three years had passed since the fighting in Gaza and Lebanon ended in a ceasefire. They painted a picture in which the new leadership of Fatah and Hamas had formed a united front against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and were demanding a full withdrawal to the 1967 “Green Line.” Students were then divided into eight teams representing the United States, the European Union, Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and given packets describing their countries’ respective goals and interests.

Meredith Hutchens, CSPS fellow and international security master’s student, helped facilitate the simulation.

"Designing and facilitating exercises like this gives us an opportunity to merge our experience as practitioners with the curriculum," said Roberts. "Seminar discussion is great, but it can't really recreate the pressure of prioritizing limited resources, options, and time against multiple urgent challenges. We compress that sensation as best we can into the game and the students report that it makes the concepts much more tangible to them."

During the simulation, each team took turns during which they could take any action incorporating one of the “instruments of national power” identified by the Defense Department’s DIME framework (i.e., diplomatic, informational, military, or economic). They then had to defend the viability of their preferred action. Every other team was given the option of either arguing in favor of or against that action's chances of success. The adjudicator—Roberts or Harper—then used dice to determine whether that team was successful. The relative strength of the arguments for and against the proposed action determined the threshold that the dice roll must reach for the action to be successful.

“It's really great to see how quickly people get into their roles,” said Meredith Hutchens, a CSPS fellow and international security master’s student. “Most people are not timid about stepping into the role, regardless of which country they’ve been assigned.”

As a CSPS fellow, Hutchens volunteered to help facilitate the simulation and was able to observe how her peers navigated the scenario. She was especially intrigued by the negotiations that took place as groups of teams sought to coordinate their actions to achieve common goals and outmaneuver other groups.

“Your decision and your actions can have a lot of consequences, and if you choose to leave someone out of your action plan, that really impacts the game,” she said.

The Schar School’s security studies graduate programs are ranked No. 4 by U.S. News & World Report and include degrees in biodefense and international security as well as a national security track in the master of public policy program and an emergency management and homeland security concentration in the master of public administration program.

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Military

Driving Innovation: DELTA-FORCE steers army vehicles into the digital future

Nathan Kahl — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 18:58:03 +0000

Driving Innovation: DELTA-FORCE steers army vehicles into the digital future Nathan Kahl Wed, 01/29/2025 - 13:58

The U.S. Army relies on numerous ground vehicles for successful operations, requiring vehicles that can navigate a variety of terrains and allow soldiers to be effective and safe. This creates a challenging set of requirements for new vehicle design, engineering, and operations that must be cost-effective.

Ali Raz. Photo by Creative Services

��AV is now an important contributor for researching novel approaches and development of new vehicles, thanks to a $1.6 million grant from the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences under Digital Enterprise Technology for Maintenance and Sustainment Improvements—Phase II effort, sponsored through the Army’s Ground Vehicle Systems Center.

The George Mason project, called DELTA-FORCE (Digital Environments for Life-Cycle Test and Evaluation For Off-Road Combat VEhicles), is a joint effort between the College of Engineering and Computing’s (CEC) Center for Excellence in Command, Control, Communications, Computing, Cyber, and Intelligence and the College of Science’s Center for Collision Safety and Analysis. Ali Raz of the Systems Engineering and Operations Research (SEOR) Department is the principal investigator (PI) and Steve Kan, a professor in Mason Science, is the co-PI.

This project aims to develop a comprehensive digital engineering methodology for new vehicle concepts. “It's a very unique opportunity for George Mason in that we're going to be building a complete digital environment for life cycle testing and analysis," Raz said. "Life cycle elements have their own domain-specific models, and analysis tools that are not linked. We are building a digital environment to connect them.”

Steve Kan. Photo by Creative Services

The different phases of the vehicle life cycle, from conceptual design, preliminary design, detailed design, manufacturing, and maintenance, each have their own models and analysis tools that do not “talk” to one another. A key aspect of this project is creating an ontology and model-based systems engineering (MBSE) foundation that will connect the different domain-models, providing a common language for integrating the models and building interfaces in a digital environment.

“In order to produce new advanced complex systems, we need to transition into digital environments; the Department of Defense has been laying the groundwork for that for five years or so,” said Raz. “So essentially we will build a digital twin for modeling the off-road vehicle and environments, that is connected to a physical twin via reverse engineering.”

Kan said that “This project will enable us to work in the digital engineering field in a holistic way by integrating different system-level requirements, design, and performance, to the physics level of materials and geometry using reverse engineering technologies. In this project, we build upon our expertise in automotive and aerospace safety engineering and collaborate with colleagues in both CEC and Mason Science at George Mason to develop this digital engineering platform.”

Raz added that DELTA-FORCE will provide an opportunity through new undergraduate courses for George Mason students to get hands-on experience in building digital twins and conducting analysis.

Although this effort is sponsored by the Department of Defense, its content does not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the government; no official endorsement should be inferred..

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Advancing sensor tech for foggy situations

Nathan Kahl — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 13:15:50 +0000

Advancing sensor tech for foggy situations Nathan Kahl Mon, 01/13/2025 - 08:15

Devices that rely on sensors to accurately navigate and perceive the world around them are more and more commonplace, from drones to autonomous vehicles to ground robots on rescue missions. Parth Pathak, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at ��AV, is working to ensure the sensors have 20/20 vision.

From left, Rezoan Ahmed Nazib, Parth Pathak, and Ahmad Kamari with a rescue robot that can "see" through smoke and fog. Photo provided

Pathak received $660K in funding from the Army Research Office (ARO) for this work, some of which is done in collaboration with colleagues at the University of California, Davis, where he did his post-doc.

“Conventional sensors rely on cameras or LiDAR (light detection and ranging) to pursue objects around them, but they don't work very well when there's smoke, fog, or generally a visually degraded environment,” said Pathak. “But the mmwave wireless radar sensors that we are working on don't get affected by that. If there is dirt on the sensor, well, that's okay. They can see through things and see around things."

Imagine a rescue robot going into a building filled with smoke, trying to navigate with little to no visibility, Pathak said. "These wireless sensors can enable them to perceive the environment and even self-localize without cameras, LiDARs, or other positioning systems.”

Another positive aspect of the devices is that while they can sense…they don’t sense too much, which is important for privacy concerns. The disadvantage, of course, is that when a sensor depicts an object such as a car, the resolution is not particularly good, and the images are “noisy.” Pathak is not just improving navigation and perception, but using multiple robots, for example, cooperatively. In a rescue mission, a swarm of robots can share their data, allowing them to collectively “see” a better picture.

Photo provided

“They can self-localize based on what they see, like how our brains work. But the robots only have wireless sensors to rely on, so part of the work is developing very good signatures of what they see from these very low resolution and noisy images,” said Pathak. “We can build 3D models of a room by scanning it through the wireless sensors and using machine learning to capture and recreate every minute detail. This is something that these sensors were never designed for. We are developing custom-tailored deep learning models of wireless sensing, essentially pushing the limits of what they can perceive using wireless signals.”

In addition to the research, ARO’s funding also supports testbed-to-prototype development and solution evaluation.

Pathak and colleagues published this research at the Association for Computing Machinery’s ACM Mobicom conference and have submitted it to other conferences for potential publication. Two PhD students from his team, Ahmed Kamari and Rezoan Ahmed Nazib, are working actively on the project, along with three high school students who participated in prototyping over the summer as part of George Mason's Aspiring Scientists Summer Internship Program.

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George Mason joins elite defense research network

Martha Bushong — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 14:25:04 +0000

George Mason joins elite defense research network Martha Bushong Sun, 12/15/2024 - 09:25

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The Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) and the Acquisition Innovation Research Center (AIRC) recently added ��AV as a member. Both managed by Stevens Institute of Technology, SERC and AIRC leverage the research and expertise of more than 25 universities nationwide.

The SERC and AIRC are two of more than a dozen University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs), which are sponsored by the Department of Defense (DoD). Art Pyster, associate dean for research for the College of Engineering and Computing (CEC), has a long history with SERC. He served as the proposal manager at Stevens when that institution won the initial designation in 2008 and subsequently served as Deputy Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer until 2016 when he joined George Mason. “We now have a full seat at the table, participating in meetings with DoD sponsors and helping to set the SERC/AIRC agenda.”

According to Mike Bunting, assistant dean for research in CEC, “Each UARC, composed of one or more universities, has a long-term strategic relationship with the DoD in a specific research area.” Bunting added the structure facilitates collaboration, and the UARC contract mechanism allows for an “easy button” to perform research for the DoD.

Most UARCs are just a single university. The SERC formed in 2008, and AIRC, formed in 2020, are different because they are university consortia. Now that George Mason is a full member, it can receive unlimited tasking from the government and collaborate with other SERC/AIRC members on their research and other activities.

“It's about having a set of resources that the government can rely upon from a trusted agent,” Bunting added. “As an R1 university, George Mason has hundreds of faculty, staff, and students who conduct research in areas of interest to the DoD. George Mason teams can propose and lead new research tasks and be part of joint projects with other members of the SERC/AIRC consortia.”

Stevens recently renewed the SERC/AIRC contract for five years, at which point they were able to add new members, including George Mason. John Shortle, chair of the Systems Engineering and Operations Research Department (SEOR), and Jerry McGinn, executive director of the Greg and Camille Baroni Center in the Costello College of Business, were instrumental in adding George Mason.

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Military 5G gets a security boost with anti-jamming research

Teresa Donnellan — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 19:01:12 +0000

Military 5G gets a security boost with anti-jamming research Teresa Donnellan Mon, 10/21/2024 - 15:01

As communication networks evolve, they present both opportunities and security challenges to military technicians. Over the past year, Assistant Professor Moinul Hossain from ��AV’s Department of Cyber Security Engineering has contributed to a research initiative aimed at ensuring the safety and integrity of 5G networks used by the United States military. Sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and led by the University of Maryland (UMD), the project focused on safeguarding military communications against potential threats such as jamming attacks.

Hossain’s colleagues will present their work, a research paper titled “Phantom Guard: An MDP-Based Anti-Jamming Defense Strategy for Military 5G Networks,” at the end of this month at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Military Communications Conference (MILCOM). As Hossain will be on leave during the conference, George Mason doctoral student Mahmudul Hassan Ashik, who contributed to the project, will join ARL’s Jeffrey Twigg and Fikadu Dagefu and UMD colleagues for the presentation.

Moinul Hossain. Photo provided

"As 5G technology becomes a cornerstone of global communications, safeguarding its security within military applications is crucial,” said Ashik, who is working on a PhD in cyber security engineering. “Our research tackles these complex challenges of protecting sensitive data transmitted over 5G networks in high-risk, adversarial environments."

While commercial 5G is already widely used for communication between devices, the military’s adoption of this technology necessitates additional measures to safeguard sensitive data and ensure secure communication, even in contested environments. Hossain’s project, which began in May 2023 and concluded in August 2024, centered on addressing this critical security concern.

"5G is a major pillar of national security, alongside emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing,” Hossain explained. “Its high throughput and low latency make it ideal for various applications, including the military. However, military use of 5G requires certain modifications to meet security standards, particularly to defend against adversarial threats like jamming."

Jamming occurs when an adversary sends a disruptive signal to interfere with communication channels, making it difficult for a receiver to decode the intended message. While this threat is not normally a concern for commercial 5G users, it is a major risk in military settings, where communication must be maintained even in hostile environments.

The research team focused on developing anti-jamming strategies to ensure military communications networks could withstand such attacks. Hossain likened this issue to bad actors compromising a secure office building (say, a headquarters) by infiltrating a less-protected satellite office. In military applications, particularly those involving unmanned vehicles or robots, compromising such resource-constrained devices could result in the loss of critical information at headquarters or even control over sensitive devices.

As the military continues to integrate emerging technologies like 5G into its operations, safeguarding these networks from adversarial threats becomes increasingly important. The collaboration between George Mason, UMD, and ARL demonstrates the critical role academic research plays in fortifying national security.

At MILCOM, the team’s work will be shared with a wider audience of defense and communication experts, contributing to the ongoing efforts to secure military networks in a connected world.

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George Mason scientist secures $1.4M DTRA grant to study viruses’ impact on organ health

Colleen Rich — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 16:30:04 +0000

George Mason scientist secures $1.4M DTRA grant to study viruses’ impact on organ health Colleen Rich Mon, 10/14/2024 - 12:30

��AV researcher Aarthi Narayanan recently secured a $1.4M grant from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) to investigate how an infection spreads between organs, and how a therapeutic will impact connected organs. The work will initially focus on mosquito-transmitted viruses while Narayanan hopes to expand the implications from these studies to other human disease states.

Aarthi Narayan. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

The study will utilize the organ on a chip platform—an emerging technology that more closely replicates human organ-based parameters—to understand how disease affects the body. The focus of this multiorgan effort will be to explore the interactions between the brain, the lung, and liver.

“When you look at an infection like West Nile Virus, for example, it affects the brain early. But that does not mean it only impacts the brain,” said Narayanan, a professor in the Department of Biology in the College of Science. “There is often multiorgan involvement in later states of disease, but we still don’t have a full understanding of how one organ reacts to another’s infection to then know how to provide more effective treatments.” This research seeks to better understand to what extent inflammation from one infected organ will affect another organ that is perhaps not infected.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic underscored how diseases affecting specific organs can disseminate throughout the body, leading to multiorgan failure at various states of disease progression. However, developing specific treatments for each emerging virus takes time, and there is an intense push toward finding broadly applicable solutions that may be used to treat different infections. This study will also explore repositioning existing FDA-approved medications as treatment options for several mosquito-transmitted viruses that do not have treatment strategies at this time.

Narayan will utilize CN-Bio’s organ on a chip platform at George Mason’s Biomedical Research Laboratory to investigate questions that are directly relevant to human disease caused by these mosquito-transmitted viruses.

“This approach will also help us position our therapeutic strategies better and hopefully decrease points of failure down the road, as we strive to come up with rapidly deployable solutions to address the national and global needs for pandemic preparedness,” said Narayanan.

“While technology is expanding in the biomedical field, one of the important differentiators that puts George Mason and its Biomedical Research Laboratory (BRL) at the forefront of this research venture is our ability to ask these globally impactful questions in high containment settings, specifically biosafety level 3 conditions,” said Cody W. Edwards, George Mason College of Science interim dean.

Established through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the George Mason BRL is one of 12 Regional Biocontainment Laboratories in the United States that offer Biosafety Level-3 (BSL-3) facilities.

The study, “Development of human-based, connected multiorgan microphysiological system in vitro models to study alphavirus infection and support countermeasure development,” will take place over the next five years.

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Mason interdisciplinary team receives $1.5 million grant from Department of Defense to research underwater explosions

Shayla Brown — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 18:00:15 +0000

Mason interdisciplinary team receives $1.5 million grant from Department of Defense to research underwater explosions Shayla Brown Mon, 12/12/2022 - 13:00

A ��AV interdisciplinary team is studying underwater explosions and their effects on civil engineering infrastructure with the support of a $1.5 million grant from Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

The interdisciplinary research team, from left to right, Girum Urgessa, Rainald Löhner, Lingquan Li, and Facundo Airaudo. Photo by Cristian Torres.

Lingquan Li, a postdoctoral research fellow, is working alongside Girum Urgessa of the College of Engineering and Computing, Rainald Löhner of the College of Science, and PhD student Facundo Airaudo.

“The sophisticated phenomenon in underwater explosions is important for government agencies interested in protective design,” said Li, who specializes in computational fluid dynamics and mathematics.

The team has run more than 100 test cases to study the structural response and the damage due explosions, Li explained. The resulting pressures and flow fields for different explosive yields and stand-off distances are provided to the Department of Defense.

Urgessa and Löhner are the co-principal investigators (PIs) on the project.

“[Girum] took more the structural part on it, and Lingquan and I did more the fluid part,” said Löhner, who is director of Mason’s Center for Computational Fluid Dynamics, where these experiments have been conducted. “So, we did the explosion in the water, and he did what happens when the shock wave hits the structure and how the structure [reacts].”

“We not only develop new numerical methods and new algorithms in order to compute these explosions, but we also delivered more than 120 results for different geometries, different loads, and different standoff distances,” said Löhner. “It has been extremely successful.”

There is a demand for experts capable of conducting blast-structure interactions and structural integrity assessments. “At Mason, we continue to mentor exceptional post-doctoral research scholars and graduate students needed to address these complex physics and engineering problems,” said Urgessa.

Lingquan Li presents her team's work on underwater explosions. Photo by Cristian Torres.

Airaudo, who is an Institute for Digital Innovation Predoctoral Fellow, is simultaneously working on another project, Optimal HVAC Outlay to Minimize Pathogen Transmission. He and Li spend most weekdays in the center working on these projects.

“It's a good way to collaborate,” said Airaudo, “because she can show me what she's working on and I can just learn from what she's doing and help her a little bit. I can also show her what I'm working on, and she can give me tips as well.”

Airaudo is grateful he gets to learn from Dr. Li, he said, as she is part of a largely underrepresented group in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

“For me personally, [this project] means a lot because research is what I'm interested in; it is the thing I'm best at,” said Li. “I don't see a lot of female researchers in my field of study. I don't know why that is, but it is very important to be inclusive because we need people from different backgrounds [and] all kinds of perspectives to [solve these research problems].”

Mason’s College of Science is above the national average in the number of women enrolled in STEM degree programs. Of the students enrolled at COS, 62 percent of undergraduates and 50 percent of the graduate students are women, according to Dean Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, who presented the numbers at a Board of Visitors meeting in December. “Quoting President [Gregory] Washington, the College of Science already looks like the rest of the country will look in 30-40 years.”