Dr. Kyle Gustafson serves as a Science Director (International Program Officer) for Mission Capable, Persistent, and Survivable Platforms at the Office of Naval Research Global, based in Sao Paulo, with responsibility for technology awareness and academic research relationships in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. He is on detail from the Emerging Technology branch within the Signatures Department at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division (NSWCCD). Dr. Gustafson is a transdisciplinary physicist with experience in computational plasma physics, systems biology, circadian genomics, nonlinear dynamics, infectious disease modeling, underwater and structural acoustics, Digital Twin, and time series analysis for maritime applications. He has expertise in data-driven cyber-physical machine learning models, high-performance computing, genomic data analysis, infectious disease modeling, and numerical methods in plasma physics.
Dr. Gustafson earned his PhD in Physics as a Fellow of the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation at the University of Maryland. He wrote his thesis on gyrokinetic methods in high-performance computational plasma physics with Prof. Bill Dorland. Then he was awarded a National Science Foundation International Research Fellowship for postdoctoral work with Prof. Paolo Ricci at the Swiss Plasma Center (formerly CRPP) in Lausanne, Switzerland at the EPFL. At EPFL, he pivoted to systems biology and studied mammalian cell rhythmic genomics with Prof. Felix Naef and Prof. Winship Herr at the University of Lausanne, affiliated with the Swiss Insitute of Bioinformatics. He returned to the US in Seattle where he worked on spatiotemporal models of Ebola and malaria with Dr. Joshua L. Proctor at the Institute for Disease Modeling, which is now part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He joined the Signatures Department at NSWCCD at the NBK Bangor Detachment in 2018.