Dr. Ashok Sivakumar is a distinguished engineer with over 20 years of experience driving international customer success for government, military, and commercial missions. His work in academia, government, and industry encompasses a wide array of US government clients. These include the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, Department of Homeland Security, Special Operations Command HQ, the Joint IED Defeat organization, Veterans Affairs, USAF program directorate for Strategic and tactical systems, USSF Space Systems Integration office, and other classified intelligence and operator communities.
As part of his contributions to Johns Hopkins University and the Applied Physics Laboratory, Ashok formulated and implemented risk-mitigation framework requirements while ensuring compliance beyond NIST and FISMA standards. For Cybercom and Space Systems Command, he evaluated software testing, including IV&V, by government collaborators such as L3 and Northrup Grumman. As an on-site systems specialist, he was a lead engineer for the DARPA Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, in which neural-haptic breakthroughs were discovered through nonhuman primate testing at the University of Pittsburgh and Caltech.
As an early employee at Microsoft, Philips, and Palantir, Dr. Sivakumar acquired the expertise to customize and implement solutions within customer constraints. His achievements include software and hardware for digital television and media chips, and managing the portfolio to customize the data ontology for US and Jordanian Special Operations Forces to expedite decision-making on the Syrian border. As a trusted leader, Dr. Sivakumar was selected to be the military and technical liaison for the largest-ever national recruitment of 2100+ Airmen for the Air Force Personalized Medicine Program.
Dr. Sivakumar holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the Johns Hopkins University, focusing on probabilistic prediction and machine learning algorithms for intractably large data sets in cancer immunology. During his stint as a US Army Signal Officer, he earned multiple commendation medals and a Bronze Star as the Automations officer in Afghanistan supporting Operations Enduring Freedom 6. Over his career, Ashok has authored 200+ classified reports, entity-data patents, and highly-cited peer-reviewed manuscripts in the fields of Cybersecurity, Distributed computing, and Life sciences.