AOR Inc. Technical Staff

Dr. William Stevens is an applied mathematician and computer scientist with over 25 years of hands-on experience supporting Government, Military, and Industry clients in the areas of Operations Research, Modeling and Simulation, Systems Effectiveness Analysis, Decision Support System Design and Implementation, Information Technology Driven Process Improvements, and Experimental Design and Execution. Dr. Stevens founded Applied Operations Research, Inc. (AOR) in July 2006. AOR provides Operations Research (OR) and Physical Modeling study support to the Littoral Battlespace Sensing – Gliders (LBS-G), Ocean Bottom Characterization Initiative (OBCI), Tactical Oceanography – Undersea Warfare (TOC/USW), Meteorology and Oceanography (METOC) Futures, and other programs managed by CNO N84 and SPAWAR PMW-120. AOR analysts work directly with PMW-120 Assistant Program Management (APM) leads and with Navy and scientific staff at CNMOC, NAVO, NRL Stennis, NRL Monterey, COMPACFLT, APL/UW, and APL/UT. AOR analysts routinely work with the outputs of Navy METOC Tier I models, including NCOM, Relo NCOM, COAMPS, and NOGAPS. AOR analysts are also highly proficient in using Navy METOC Tier II models (e.g. NSPE, CASS, AREPS, TAWS, etc.) and databases (e.g. GDEM, MOODS, DBDB-V, LFBL, HFBL, DTED, AREPS Climatology, etc.). AOR analysts also support the verification and validation of Navy METOC Tier III tactical decision aids (TDAs) using physics-level modeling and simulation techniques coupled with Koopman search and screening optimal search techniques. Dr. Stevens received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics with concentration in Computational Fluid Dynamics at Brown University's Division of Applied Mathematics in 1979.

Dr. Martin Siderius has over fifteen years of experience in underwater acoustics including experimental and theoretical studies of acoustic propagation physics and signal processing. He has developed several R&D programs which include seabed geoacoustic inversion techniques and methods to exploit the ocean ambient noise field for sonar performance improvements and for passive environmental monitoring and characterization. Other research projects include studies on the effects of sound on the marine environment (impact of anthropogenic sound on marine life), underwater acoustic communications and environmentally adaptive signal processing for passive and active sonar. Dr. Siderius was the 2009 recipient of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) Medwin Prize in Acoustical Oceanography which is awarded to "recognize the effective use of sound in the discovery and understanding of physical and biological parameters and processes in the sea". Dr. Siderius is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Portland State University, Co-Director of the Northwest Electromagnetic and Acoustics Research Laboratory (NEAR-Lab), and Director of AOR Portland Operations.

Dr. Lisa Zurk's research interests are primarily in the area of sensing phenomenon and have such relevant applications as remote sensing of the earth's surface, detection of explosives or bio-agents, and acoustic detection of underwater sources (e.g., salmon populations). She is the author of over 50 technical publications and serves on numerous professional committees. Dr. Zurk was recently awarded the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Entry-Level Faculty award for a proposal entitled Mid-Frequency Bottom Scattering Model Development and Validation. This Special Research Award in Ocean Acoustics provides funding for three years at the level of $100,000 per year, beginning January 2006. Dr. Zurk leads a number of collaborations with such institutions as MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington, Oregon Health & Science University's OGI School of Science & Engineering, Oregon State University, and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She founded the Northwest Electromagnetic and Acoustics Research Laboratory (NEAR-Lab) in the Maseeh College, which involves eight graduate and undergraduate students and several ECE faculty members. Dr. Zurk is Maseeh Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Portland State University, Director of the Northwest Electromagnetic and Acoustics Research Laboratory (NEAR-Lab), and Co-Director of AOR Portland Operations.

Dr. Colin Jemmott received his Ph.D. in Acoustics in 2010 and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2008, both from The Pennsylvania State University. His graduate research subject area was undersea signal processing for antisubmarine warfare applications. His dissertation was titled "Model-based recursive Bayesian state estimation for single-hydrophone passive localization," and used a statistical, physics-based approach to localize an undersea target. Techniques used include Monte Carlo acoustic propagation, non-parametric and maximum entropy probability density function estimation, and recursive Bayesian estimation techniques such as particle filters. As an employee of the Naval Research Lab, Dr. Jemmott researched human-mimetic perception based classification techniques for impulsive active sonar returns. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvey Mudd College in Engineering, where he worked on diverse projects from designing an all-digital feed forward linearizer for high power RF amplifiers to using a wind tunnel to measure the forces on a curveball.

Carolyn Harris received her S.M. in Physical Oceanography at the MIT/WHOI Joint Graduate Program in Oceanography in 1996. She has over ten years of experience in physical oceanography, particularly focused on instrumentation and observational work including synthesizing observational results with modeling predictions and theory. She has an additional ten years' experience in industry R&D developing sensors and digital signal processing for integration into optical and electro-mechanical systems. At AOR, Lyn is leading the data collection and analysis portion of the U.S. Navy’s GEOglider ocean bottom loss collection system sea trials and system verification and validation testing.