MAIS '15, PhD Computational & Data Sciences '19
Ross J. Schuchard is an active-duty military officer in the U.S. Army currently serving as a Data Scientist and Operations Research Analyst in the Department of Defense. He received his Bachelor of Science in Economics from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 2004. Following his graduation and commissioning, he served for nine years as an aviation officer prior to transitioning to his current career as an Operations Research and Systems Analysis officer.
In 2015, he received his Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies with a Computational Social Science Concentration from George Mason University. After departing Mason he helped launch the first cyber data science organization in the DOD dedicated to creating analytics in support of U.S. national cyber defense policy at the tactical, operational and strategic levels. He ultimately served as the chief technical and programmatic lead of U.S. Army Cyber Command’s big data platform and agile analytic development cycle, one of the first DOD entities to migrate to a cloud-based environment.
In the year following his graduation from Mason, Schuchard was recognized as one of the Army’s top operations researchers, receiving the 2015 Wilbur Payne Award and the 2015 INFORMS Seth Bonder Scholar awardee for military applications. His research interests include gaining better insights into complex adaptive systems through computational methods, specifically, agent-based modeling, social network analysis, discrete event simulations and big data analytics.