Researcher

Dr. Mark R. Blackburn is a member of the SERC Research Council, providing guidance with a focus in the Systems Engineering and Systems Management Transformation research area. Dr. Blackburn is a member of OpenMBEE Leadership Team, a community of Model-Based Engineering Practitioners and Software Developers for the open-source model-based engineering environment or OpemMBEE. He is the Principal Investigator (PI) on several SERC research tasks for both NAVAIR and US. Army ARDEC on Systems Engineering Transformation through Model-Centric Engineering. Dr. Blackburn is also a Senior Research Scientist with Stevens Institute of Technology and principal at KnowledgeBytes. His research focuses on methods, models, and automated tools for reasoning about complex systems of systems.

He has also been Principal on a FAA NextGen project and has received research funding from the National Science Foundation. Dr. Blackburn develops and teaches a course on Systems Engineering of Cyber Physical Systems. Prior to joining Stevens, Dr. Blackburn worked in industry for more than 25 years. He has been the Principal Investigator to the National Institute of Standards and Technology on projects dating back to 2000 involving model-based tools and methods for verification and validation of security-related products and applications. Dr. Blackburn holds a Ph.D. from George Mason University, a M.S. in Mathematics (emphasis in C.S.) from Florida Atlantic University, and a B.S. in Mathematics (C.S. option) from Arizona State University.

Dr. Blackburn is an inventor and entrepreneur with more than twenty five years of software systems engineering experience in development, management and applied research of process, methods and tools. He is involved in consulting, research, training, strategic planning, proposal and business development, as well as developing and applying methods and tools to software and system engineering. He is the co-inventor of a theorem proving-based test vector generation system called T-VEC.-+

Dr. Blackburn spends much of his time doing research in the areas of modeling, formal analysis and visualization, and also helps companies adopt, adapt, tailor and apply new technologies, tools and methods. He is currently involved in a number of projects involving analysis and testing of adaptive autonomous systems, Bayesian networks, MBSE, domain specific modeling and concept engineering using gaming technology and immersive environments. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and symposia, and has authored more than 100 papers covering a broad spectrum of topics such as modeling, requirements engineering, verification, software safety, security, reliability, automatic test vector generation, formal methods, and measurement.

Dr. Blackburn has been consulting with companies and organizations such as AT&T, BAE Systems, Boeing, Citibank, CSC, DARPA, DHS, EDS, Embraer, FAA, General Dynamics, Hamilton Sundstrand, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Medtronic, NASA, NAVAIR, NCR, NIST, Northrop Grumman, Qualcomm, Raytheon, Rockwell, Pratt Whitney, SRA, UTC, and Xerox for the last 17 years.