From Battlefield to Professor

Dr. Paul J. Nicholas is an operations research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU APL). He also teaches a graduate course on analytics and decision analysis as part of GMU’s Data Analytics Engineering (DAEN) program and serves in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. Paul’s research focuses on the use of advanced analytic techniques to examine problems in national security, including large-scale combinatorial optimization, simulation, and data analytics. Paul received his B.S. from the U.S. Naval Academy, his M.S. from the Naval Postgraduate School, and his Ph.D. from George Mason University. On active duty, he deployed several times to Iraq and Afghanistan in support of combat operations as a communications officer and operations research analyst. He was a visiting fellow to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, and an MIT Seminar XXI Fellow. He is the author of numerous peer-reviewed publications and holds two U.S. patents.