The following panel discussion took place at our Defense Innovation night at Venture Café Cambridge. The panel discusses the role of government labs in defense innovation.
To find out more about our Defense Innovation program, please visit us online at venturecafecambridge.org/defenseinno.
PANELISTS
Moderator: Dr. Francesca Scire-Scappuzzo, BAE Systems, Inc.
Dr. Scire-Scappuzzo is Sr. Dir. of Advanced Technology & Innovation and Tech Scouting Lead at BAE Systems FAST Labs. She was Co-founder and CEO at Ondetech LLC, Cambridge, MA; Vice President of R&D/CTO at Metamagnetics Inc., Canton, MA; Principal Research Scientist at Physical Sciences Inc., Andover, MA; and tenured Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of Catania, Italy. Francesca obtained her BS and MS, in EE at Univ. of Catania, Italy; MS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA; PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland; and she was Post Graduate Fellow at the European Space Agency ESA/ESTEC in The Netherlands. Dr. Scire-Scappuzzo has published over 30 technical papers in peer-reviewed journals and holds 7 patents. She is serving as Chair of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, Boston Section, and Reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Antenna and Propagation, Plasma Science, and Antenna and Propagation Letters.
Dr. Bernadette Johnson, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Dr. Bernadette Johnson is the Chief Technology Ventures Officer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The Technology Ventures Office was established in 2018 to support access to and development of commercial technologies relevant to national security. Prior to this appointment, she was the Chief Science Officer (CSO) at Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), which focuses on accelerating commercial innovation for the Department of Defense. As CSO, her primary responsibilities were to provide strategic guidance on emergent technologies and support development of a technical workforce. Dr. Johnson is a 2007 recipient of the Lincoln Laboratory Technical Excellence Award for her system-level architecting, technical innovation, and prototype demonstration. She holds a BS degree in physics from Dickinson College, an MS degree in condensed matter theory from Georgetown University, and a PhD degree in plasma physics from Dartmouth College. She attended the Harvard Kennedy School’s Senior Executives in National and International Security Program in 2015 and has served as a member of the Naval Studies Board since 2012.
Dr. Charlene Stokes, U.S. Army CCDC Army Research Laboratory
Dr. Stokes is the Army Research Lab (ARL) Human Research and Effectiveness Directorate’s (HRED) Lead for human-centered research and innovation in the Northeast region, operating out of ARL Open Campus, Northeast, and serving as the Deputy Program Manager of STRONG. She completed a dual-focused Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational & Human Factors Psychology at Wright State University. Beginning with the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) and most recently joining ARL/HRED, she has over 14 years of experience as a defense researcher and program manager working to push the boundaries of DoD innovation, particularly in the area of human-agent teaming and artificial intelligence. She established and directed the Human-Machine Social Systems (HMSS) Lab as an AFRL resource at Yale University from 2011-2016. She then moved the HMSS Lab from Yale to a Boston robotics innovation hub for startups, MassRobotics, to increase engagement with the commercial sector and spur Government S&T innovation. Her primary research focus is on the social dynamics of human-machine interaction, with numerous publications on the topic of trust in autonomy and human-machine teaming. She is heavily involved with service activities in the Boston local area, she serves on various NATO research task gro