George Duchak

Dr. Duchak has held executive leadership positions in each phase of the product lifecycle from S&T to R&D to Acquisition and Sustainment.  He has had an active and broad career with “tours of duty” in the military, private sector, and public sector.

In the public sector, he was most recently the Chief Information & Innovation Officer for the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), ~#75 on the Fortune 100 with ~$45B in annual revenue; a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (DASD) with a $165B acquisition portfolio of programs in the areas of Command, Control, Communications, Cyber & Business Systems; the Founding Director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), in Mountain View, CA where he provided a conduit between the innovation ecosystem of Silicon Valley and the Department of Defense; and the Director of the Air Force’s C4I & Cyber research laboratory in Rome, NY where he grew revenue from $700M to $1.3B over three years and was selected as the Federal Lab Director of the Year.  Earlier in his public sector journey, he was also a DARPA Program Manager in the eigenspace of C4I and Cyber.

In the private sector, Dr. Duchak was an entrepreneur and businessman with more than a decade of industry experience starting several companies that served the US Government by providing technical consultancy or products, principally in the areas of communications and intelligence exploitation using crowd sourcing techniques, big data analytics, and cloud services well before industry in general and DoD began to move in this direction. He was most recently the Chief Operating Officer for a novel battery start-up.

Finally, and most importantly, he served proudly in the United States Navy as an Aerospace Engineering Duty Officer and Naval Flight Officer flying P-3 surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft across the globe.

Dr. Duchak is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, The Ohio State University, George Mason University, and University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business earning degrees in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Avionics, Aeronautical Engineering, Public Policy, and Business Administration. He is a licensed Professional Engineer and has completed both Carnegie Mellon University’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) & Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) courses.  He is a current board member of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association Cybersecurity Subcommittee and an advisory board member for MasterPeace Solutions.  Dr. Duchak is married to Sonya Milley, Esq., an attorney, and they have two adult children, Alexander and Tatiana.