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Inducted October 2022
With over three decades of indelible contributions to M&S, Dr. Wall, CMSP charter member, is a technical leader, M&S textbook author, and iconic visionary. His work in advancing M&S has enabled the transformation of training and testing across multiple communities that safeguard our national and personal security, including our warfighters, emergency responders, airport operations specialists, medical professionals, intelligence officers, secret service agents, epidemiologists, and students studying M&S.
Dr. Wall was an Army Acquisition Corps officer for 22 years. The Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland was his final assignment, where he served as a senior computer scientist. During his military service, he led a group of scientists and engineers across industry, academia and government under DARPA sponsorship to develop a plan for transitioning the Defense Simulation Internet from a private network to a public asynchronous transfer mode environment with guaranteed quality of service.
He was the 2012 conference chair for the largest simulation conference in the world, the Interservice/Industrial Training, Simulation, and Education Conference sponsored by the National Training and Simulation Association. The mayor of Los Angeles He appointed Dr. Wall in 2011 to serve on a 26-member blue ribbon panel to conduct a security review of the Los Angeles International Airport. In 2022, he supported the Defense Science Board on a year-long study related to gaming, exercising, modeling and simulation.
Before retiring in 2021, Dr. Wall was the executive director of the TAMU Center for Applied Technology and director of the Innovation Proving Ground, which rigorously tests innovative technologies and a range of prototypes sooner in the acquisition process. This “shift left” testing approach includes the use of integration platforms populated by several different technologies to assess the level of integration and interoperability. He has extensive experience in command-and-control systems, distributed simulation environments, and virtual reality applications.
Dr. Wall was the co-principal investigator for the highly successful and commercialized Digital EMS program that connects ER transport with emergency rooms and transmits real-time video and physiological telemetry. This work continues in the form of investigating new paradigms in mobile healthcare and innovative aging technology. His team’s bio-surveillance common operational picture developed for the DHS National Bio-surveillance Integration Center won the 2010 DHS Science & Technology Impact Award.
Dr. Wall has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from TAMU and a M.S. degree in Systems Technology (Command, Control, and Communications) from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. In 2009, he was designated as a regents fellow by the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents.
On active duty, Dr. Wall served as the chief of the Advanced Distributed Simulation Branch at Army Research Labs, where he led research contributing to the Synthetic Theater of War – Europe, demonstrating that M&S can be scaled to support the training of a large geographically dispersed force seamlessly integrated in a common synthetic battlespace, forming the technical underpinnings to future live-virtual-constructive technologies.
Dr. Wall served in a variety of high-profile appointments at TAMU, including the board of directors for the Army’s Distributed Simulation Research Consortium, the National Institute for Justice Technical Working Group, and the Defense Science Board task force, which focused on gaming, exercises, modeling, and simulation. Near the end of his tenure, he managed a $50M allocation from the state of Texas to establish the Innovation Proving Ground, a part of the Bush Combat Development Center, which uses M&S to meet the challenges presented by emerging technologies (such artificial intelligence, 5G, etc.) critical to military systems.
As he made these technical accomplishments, Dr. Wall simultaneously served as a volunteer for I/ITSEC for over 25 years, starting as a committee member in 1986 and ultimately executing the duties of conference chair in 2010.
Recently retired as the executive director of the Texas A&M Center for Applied Technology, he earned a TAMU graduate faculty appointment and was the recipient of numerous other awards, including the Regents Fellow (the TAMU system’s highest award) and the Inaugural TAMU Engineering Experiment Station Engineering a Brighter Future Award.
