Innovation Panel: “Creating Disruptive Inter-disciplinary Innovation in Engineering”

Ed Abrigo

is president and CEO of the Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) in Virginia. He leads CIT in its mission to create and execute strategies to accelerate innovation, imagination, and the next generation of technology and technology companies. He is responsible for CIT’s overall strategic planning, financial management and employee engagement and is also directly accountable for outreach to, and collaboration with, the business and education communities and the Commonwealth of Virginia government.

Prior to joining CIT, Mr. Albrigo was COO of The Hilltop Companies, a group of financial services and technology consulting companies in McLean, Virginia, where he led business development and client engagement programs for Fortune 500 companies and federal agencies regulating the financial services markets. He joined Hilltop after 15 years as a senior executive with Freddie Mac and after serving as CEO of Ignition Mortgage Technology. Before that, he held a variety of technology and marketing positions with the Corporation for Open Systems, Booz Allen & Hamilton, and CSC. He started his professional career launching spacecraft for NASA.

Mr. Albrigo has B.S. degrees in biological and computer sciences from the University of Rochester and the University of Maryland and an MBA from San Diego State University.

S. Gulu Gambhir

is executive vice president and CTO of Leidos. He provides strategic direction for the corporation’s technology offerings, guides its research and development program, and promotes business growth through technology innovation. He leads the corporate Office of Technology, including oversight of program execution, engineering, and internal information technology. Before joining Leidos, then known as SAIC, in 2009, Dr. Gambhir served as director of Northrop Grumman's Science and Technology Operating Unit of TASC, where he held a variety of technical and managerial roles.

Dr. Gambhir holds a B.S. in aerospace engineering from the University of Virginia, and both an M.S. in operations research and a D.Sc. in systems engineering from the George Washington University. He has published more than a dozen technical papers in various fields, including systems engineering, modeling and simulation, and aerospace systems.

Dr. Gambhir is a current member of the AFCEA (Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association) Technology Committee and recently served on the Intelligence and National Security Alliance’s cloud computing task force. He also serves on the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science Board of Trustees, the GW School of Engineering and Applied Science National Advisory Council, the board of the VirginiaFIRST 501(c)(3), and the advisory board of the Children's Science Center.

Naeem Hussain

is the founder of the DC-based management consulting firm AgileTrailblazers.  In this role, he focuses on advisory services for the leadership team of respective organizations for enterprise transformation, scaling agile adoption across the enterprise, creating insourcing strategies, and implementing DevOps practices.  During his consulting career, Mr. Hussain has worked with large corporate clients such asCapital One Bank, Angie’s List, Urban Outfitters, Pointroll, and Transamerica.

With an MBA from the University of Chicago and an M.S. degree from the George Washington University, Mr. Hussain has held various leadership and executive positions with Siemens, ING DIRECT, Capital One and, just prior to co-founding AgileTrailblazers, as COO of MGRM Holdings.  Mr. Hussain also serves as a member of the SEAS National Advisory Council. 

Glenn Roberts

is the chief engineer for the Center for Advanced Aviation System Development, at the MITRE Corporation, where he directs MITRE’s investments in aviation, transportation, autonomy and international research and development. He also directs the Center’s activities in technology transfer, technical publishing, intellectual property, and collaboration with the academic, research and technical/standards communities.

Dr. Roberts has more than 30 years of experience in systems engineering and aviation.  He was a member of the core team that developed the nation’s first analytic simulation of the entire National Airspace System, and later was the principal architect of MITRE’s first networked human-in-the-loop real-time air traffic management simulation environment, now known as the Integration, Demonstration & Experimentation for Aeronautics (IDEA) laboratory. Before joining MITRE, Dr. Roberts developed innovation diffusion models and other tools for the analysis of energy-saving procedures and technologies for the U.S. Department of Energy.

Dr. Roberts is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and sits on the editorial boards of the AIAA Journal of Air Transportation and ATC Quarterly. He holds B.S., M. Eng., and Ph.D. degrees in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.