Timothy Bair, Col, USAF (ret).

Mr. Bair has 26 years of experience as a USAF maintenance and logistics officer. His assignments included command, line, and staff assignments with experience in program management, systems development, training, and education. He has extensive experience in maintenance processes at the organizational, intermediate, and depot levels, as well as supply chain management, transportation, and logistics planning functions. He was temporarily assigned as an investigator for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. Colonel Bair has a Masters of Science degree in National Resource Strategy from the National Defense University, and a Masters of Science degree in Logistics Management from the Air Force Institute of Technology. Colonel Bair is now employed by the Applied Research Laboratory's Systems and Operations Automation division where he conducts research into advanced logistics transformation enabling technologies such as Condition Based Maintenance and Enterprise Architecture to support it.

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Stewart Kurtz, PhD.

Dr. Kurtz has 27 years of industry experience working at such companies as Bell Laboratories, Phillips Laboratories in Briar Cliff Manor New York and Eindhoven Holland, and Bristol Myers Corporation. Dr. Kurtz worked on the early optoelectronic communications materials and devices at Bell and the early optical recording (CD) technologies at Phillips in the 1960's and 1970's. At Bristol Myers, Dr. Kurtz was responsible for the design, engineering, development and safety of millions of mass produced consumer electronic products. In 1987, Dr. Kurtz joined Penn State University as a Professor of Electrical Engineering. Over the next 15 years, while at Penn State University, Dr. Kurtz developed and taught courses on Introductory and Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Reliability as well as Engineering Design and Reliability for Nuclear and Mechanical Engineers in the Engineering College. Dr. Kurtz is a recognized authority on engineering materials, their microstructure, and their reliability in devices and systems. He has been a consultant to industry and government since 1987.

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Richard Ciocci, PhD, PE

Dr. Ciocci has industrial experience with both Monsanto Research Corporation, Mound Facility, and AMP Incorporated. At Mound, Dr. Ciocci worked as a manufacturing/product engineer on the detonator subassemblies for the Department of Energy weapons complex. At AMP, Dr. Ciocci was a manufacturing engineer for many of the tried and true electronic connectors that the company has made for years. Dr. Ciocci joined the faculty of Harrisburg Area Community College in 1985 and then Penn State University – Harrisburg in 2002. He has taught such courses as sustainable engineering, tool design, statistical quality control, and reliability in design at the undergraduate level and quality control and manufacturing systems at the graduate level. Dr. Ciocci has been active in consulting on industrial and design-related projects. Dr. Ciocci is a licensed professional engineer who conducted his doctoral research at the Computer-Aided Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) Electronic Products and Systems Center at the University of Maryland.

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Robert Gray, PhD.

Dr. Robert Gray earned a Ph.D. in EE from The Ohio University and a MSEE from the United States Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT). At Penn State, Dr. Gray teaches on the subjects of statistical methods for engineering, design for engineers, systems and reliability engineering, data analysis using graphical techniques and software with the applied use of probability and statistics; all which can be used to support new product development, the design of mechanical systems, the manufacturing of goods or decision making processes. Dr. Gray is currently an Associate Professor of Engineering at Penn State Erie and the Director of the Center for Navigation, Communication & Information Systems at the Pennsylvania Transportation Institute, Penn State University, University Park. His technical practice involves the systems design and testing of electrical and mechanical avionics systems. Dr. Gray has twenty-four publications and two patents related to his work.

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Paul Kurtz, PhD.

Dr. Paul Kurtz has 47 years experience in university, industry and DoD research, development and system acquisition. At ARL/PSU his specialties were systems engineering, guidance and control, acoustics, advanced system concept development and modeling and simulation. His work during this time included development of stochastic modeling techniques for the prediction time-varying probability of failure of electromechanical systems. As technical director of the MK 50 torpedo development program, an ACAT 1 acquisition program, Dr. Kurtz led full scale weapon system development including first time Navy implementation of the Willoughby templates for reliability growth and field demonstration that reliability requirements were met by the final design. At Martin Marietta, Dr. Kurtz was director of research and technology at the Aero and Naval Systems division, responsible for development and FAA qualification of advanced composite aerostructures and for the development of undersea vehicles and sensing systems. His work has resulted in 24 publications, 9 awards for technical achievement and 2 patents. He received a BS in physics (1961) from Indiana State University and his MS in Engineering Science (1967) and PhD in Mechanical Engineering (1975) from Penn State University.

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John I. McCool, PhD.

John I. McCool is a Distinguished Professor of Systems Engineering at Penn State's Great Valley School of Graduate Professional Studies in Malvern PA. He teaches courses in Statistics, Reliability, Design of Experiments, Quality Control, Data Mining and Operations Research. He has been a full time faculty member at the Great Valley campus since 1988. His entire career prior to 1988 was spent as a member of the research organization of SKF a multinational manufacturer of ball and roller bearings. His last position at SKF was as Principal Engineering Scientist. He was responsible for conducting corporate, as well as federally sponsored, research projects and was principal investigator for projects with the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Office of Naval Research, the Naval Air Propulsion Center, Department of Energy and Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Two main themes in his research are 1) the tribology of rolling bearings with emphasis on rough surface contact and traction and 2) reliability with emphasis on statistical inference for the Weibull probability distribution. He is the author or co-author of over 60 refereed journal articles. He is a Fellow of the American Society for Quality (ASQ), a certified Reliability Engineer and the chair of the National Quality Month Committee for the Philadelphia ASQ Section. He holds Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Drexel University, and a Ph.D in Statistics from Temple University.