Three Draper Fellows Among 10 Winners of 2009 Bradley Fellowships
Three Draper Fellows won 2009 Omar Nelson Bradley Officer Research Fellowship in Mathematics, which are awarded to U.S. Army officers actively engaged in studying, teaching, or applying mathematics to a U.S. Army problem. Captain Benjamin Hung, Captain Jed Richards, and Major Scott Seidel were notified July 13, 2009, that they are among the 10 winners selected for 2009. Bradley Fellowships provide each recipient with $2,000 for research projects proposed in their applications for a fellowship. The research proposed by the Draper Fellows was based on the thesis research that they have been conducting at Draper Laboratory for their master’s degrees.
The three are graduate students at MIT. Hung and Seidel are pursuing master’s degrees in operations research; Richards is working on a master’s degree in the System Design and Management Program in the Engineering Systems Division of the School of Engineering. All are expected to graduate in May 2010. Following graduation, all three will become instructors at West Point; Richards will be an instructor in the Systems Engineering Department, and Hung and Seidel will teach in the Department of Mathematics.
Hung’s research topic is optimization-based selection of influencers in a rural Afghan social network. His thesis advisor is Professor Asuman Ozdaglar of MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and Dr. Stephan Kolitz (GCB1) is his Draper thesis supervisor. “Both have been and will continue tobeinstrumentalinhelpingmewiththiseffort,”saidHung. HeplanstousetheBradleyFellowship funds to travel to several research centers to gather more information for his work.
Richards is investigating the utility of geospatial data for Army decision makers at the Brigade level and below. He plans to conduct a tradespace analysis on the Army’s geospatial enterprise architecture to determine what changes might be made to increase the power of this “map data” to Army users. Richards’s thesis supervisor at Draper is Human-System Collaboration Group Leader Laura Major.
Seidel is researching tactical-level counterinsurgency (COIN) operations, specifically creating a model that determines the size and location of combat outposts to maximize security for the population. His Draper thesis supervisor is Dr. Rick Hildebrant (GCB2), and his thesis advisor at MIT is Prof. Stephen Graves of the Sloan School of Management.
For more information about the Bradley Fellowship program, see http://mathcs.muhlenberg.edu/moin/mathcs/Bradley.