Background

Biography

Donald Ponikvar, Ph.D., serves on the Steering Committee for the OASIS Emergency Interoperability Member Section; his term extends to April 2009.

Dr. Ponikvar has provided scientific, engineering and technical support to the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the US Department of Energy, the FBI, and to local First Responder organizations dealing with nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological terrorism. He is currently assigned to the Assessments Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO), where he leads the Pilot Program support team, which is developing and fielding an overarching data exchange model for the DNDO defensive architecture. He previously led efforts in modeling and simulation, domestic counterterrorism support, and computer-based analysis. He established a private industry team providing software, ruggedized information technology hardware, and training to FBI bomb squads, and more than 3,000 First Responders across the country who deal with NBC threats and with improvised explosive devices. He was an advisor to the original Steering Committee for the Capital Wireless Information Network (CapWIN), an initiative in the greater Washington, DC area. He has provided support to First Responder tabletop and live exercises under the sponsorship of the Office for Domestic Preparedness (ODP), part of the Department of Homeland Security. He served as the focal point for an initiative to coordinate NBC modeling efforts across the DoD.

Dr. Ponikvar has more than 33 years of experience in military nuclear, biological, and chemical defense, military operations, and physics research related to National Defense topics. As a distinguished West Point graduate and career Army officer, he served in tactical assignments in Germany, where he was the NBC Defense Officer for a Cavalry squadron deployed near the East German border. He was later assigned to the Department of Physics at West Point, where he helped establish a laser research laboratory. For several years, he worked on a large scale laser experiment under President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Based on that work, the novelist Tom Clancy has acknowledged him as the real life “Al Gregory”, the Army officer/laser physicist character of his book Cardinal of the Kremlin. His doctoral work was in experimental laser physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a Hertz Foundation Fellow.

Dr. Ponikvar has been working with the Emergency Interoperability Consortium for several years, and he is a member of the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, the National Defense Industrial Association, and the Law Enforcement Information Management Section of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP).

History

Site account active for

46 weeks 2 days