Dr. Paul D. Nielsen is the Director and CEO of Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute. The SEI advances software engineering, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence to support the US Department of Defense and the global community. Previously Nielsen served in the U. S. Air Force for 32 years, retiring as a major general. Nielsen is a member of the U. S. National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, IEEE, and the International Council on Systems Engineering. He received his PhD in computational plasma physics from the University of California, Davis.