December 2025 Internal Newsletter
FEATURED PICTURE OF THE MONTH
Grassfield High School Programming students visited OERI and got to spend some time in the SEALab doing a Maritime Maintenance Programming Challenge, where using the Sphero RVR's, they had to design an attachment that would help clean debris out of a tank and program the RVR to do so autonomously.
December Newsletter OERI Corner
Across OERI
Publications
OERI In The News
Upcoming Events
OERI Corner Employment Recognitions
KAREN PRADO OERI 22 YEARS
JESSICA JOHNSON VDMC 7 YEARS
AHMET SAGLAM VISA 4 YEARS
SANDIP ROY CSICS 4 YEARS
OERI New Hires Saumya Dabhi
Seth Huthmaker
AI Software Developer for Health, Education, AI, & Learning (HEAL)
Project Scientist for CSICS
Service Awards
2025 OERI Team Member Service Awards
HECTOR GARCIA OERI 25 YEARS
CAROL CONSIDINE ICAR 25 YEARS
TRACEY VANN OERI 20 YEARS
MENION CROLL VISA 20 YEARS
Service Awards
2025 OERI Team Member Service Awards
JOSE PADILLA VMASC 15 YEARS
KEVIN O’BRIEN OERI 5 YEARS
LOUISE SALINAS SATTL 5 YEARS
Monthly Awards & Proposals
Pre-Awards and Contract Awards
*NOTE: THESE AWARDS ARE AS OF 11/24/25 - PRE-AWARDS ARE SUBMITTED PROPOSALS JAN
FEB
MAR
APRIL
MAY
JUNE
JULY
AUG
SEPT
OCT
NOV
PreAwards
4.3M
942K
5.7M
995K
1.9M
3.1M
4.4M
3.1M
3.5M
12.1M
4.9M
Contract Awards
174K
0
1.5M
7.5M
75K
343K
261K
177K
1M
15.1M
127K
Across OERI ODU Fall Graduates
Congratulations to our OERI team members who proudly graduated during the Fall 2025 Commencement—well done on this outstanding achievement!
Matthew Kyte
Mel Miller-Felton
Seth Huthmaker
Ashley Buczkowski
Across OERI ICAR Hosts Dutch Dialogues Conference November 5-7, 2025
Ten years ago, through a collaborative process called the Dutch Dialogues, the government of the Netherlands sent representatives to Hampton Roads to provide consultation with localities on how to tackle the region’s flooding problem. These interactions launched coastal resilience initiatives throughout Hampton Roads, noted Carol Considine, the ICAR Director of Applied Projects. ICAR sponsored the “Dutch Dialogues - Life at Sea Level” conference in Norfolk, celebrating the 10th anniversary of the initial collaboration and charting a coastal resilience pathway to the future. The conference hosted international speakers and representatives from other coastal cities experiencing flooding including New Orleans and Charleston, S.C. The conference organizers used interactive exercises to explore how the region can accelerate adaptation and resilience efforts. ICAR Executive Director Dr. Jessica Whitehead spoke at a roundtable discussion about hopes for the future and also moderated a panel on young professionals working in the coastal resilience field. ICAR Faculty Member Laura Costadone, one of those featured young professionals, presented her research on the economic and ecological benefits of using natural and nature-based features to address stormwater challenges in a Virginia Beach neighborhood.
VDMC Hosts Isle of Wight Schools Professional Development Day November 10, 2025 VDMC hosted Isle of Wight County Schools STEM, Coding, Computer Science, and CTE teachers for Professional Development Day. Facilitated by VDMC Curriculum Coordinator Jennifer Renne and Research Assistant Professor and Director of the Applied Cognitive Engineering and Simulation Lab (ACES Lab) Dr. Jessica Johnson, the PK-12 teachers learned about the free resources available to them through https://www.maritimeeduhub.org/, including interactive mini-simulations and handson projects that help students discover and engage with diverse maritime career opportunities. In addition to exploring our free educational sources on the Maritime Education Hub, the teachers participated in the Incredible Bulk STEM outreach activity, where they learned about physical and digital blueprints and systems they might see on/in a bulkhead on a ship. The activity also introduced teachers to careers connected to ship design and construction.
The Professional Development Day was part of a partnership with Isle of Wight County Schools, and VDMC is excited to continue working with them to offer more professional development and other outreach activities!
Across OERI Neurable Grant November 13, 2025 VDMC’s Dr. Jessica Johnson and the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing's Andwele Grant are partnering with maritime training leaders to bring Neurable EEG into an Industry 5.0 pipeline for skilled trades training research and design. The pilot targets blueprint interpretation and discrepancies where routing can drive novice rework via expert insight. The goal: reduce errors and ramp novices faster by triggering neuro-adaptive XR “guardrails” when attention dips or cognitive load spikes during critical steps, thus leading to enhanced human performance and accelerated training. A multimodal insight stack will synchronize multimodal data streams to translate brain-state signals into timely, just-enough prompts. The shared testbed will pair high-fidelity digital training twin environments with operator insight (OpInsight) data to quantify training impact and transfer. Goal is dissemination across the Maritime Industrial Base. What’s next: • Blended pathway: offline XR practice + on-the-job AR overlays for routing • EEG-informed warning salience and pacing rules (“Neuro-Safety Guardrails”) • Open protocol for scaling to other trades (inspection, shipfit, NDT) and broader manufacturing
Across OERI
Grassfield HS Visits OERI November 14, 2025 Grassfield High School Programming students visited the ODU Office of Enterprise Research and Innovation and got to spend some time in the SEALab. Students got the chance to speak with SEALab's Hector Garcia and John Shull about their projects and their work with Unity. After the presentation, students participated in a Maritime Maintenance Programming Challenge, where using the Sphero RVR's, students had to design an attachment that would help clean debris out of a tank and program the RVR to do so autonomously. We are so grateful for our continued partnership with Grassfield High School and for the opportunity to help inspire and support the future innovators, problem-solvers, and maritime leaders.
The First Virginia Climate Assessment (VCA) November 21, 2025
ICAR Executive Director Jessica Whitehead and Faculty Member Laura Costadone collaborated with the Virginia Climate Center on the drafting and review of the Virginia Climate Assessment, the Commonwealth's first comprehensive, science-based evaluation of how changing climate conditions have and will impact Virginia. The study, led by the George Mason University Virginia Climate Center, is the first ever statewide, science-based assessment of Virginia’s past, current, and future climate. The study says that sea levels are rising at a moderate rate currently but could accelerate greatly in just the next few decades.
Check it out here: https://www.vaclimate.gmu.edu/virg inia-climate-assessment/about-thereport
Across OERI VDMC Executive Director Served as Panel Member at Defense TechConnect Innovation Summit & Expo November 19, 2025
VDMC Executive Director Mark Whitney served on a panel at the Defense TechConnect Innovation Summit & Expo in National Harbor, MD. The panel, Industry Spotlight: Leveraging AI-Driven Technologies to Enhance Public Shipyard and Depot Operations, focused on how the Navy’s exploding use of emerging technologies to accelerate weapon system design, streamline construction, and enhance operational maintenance, must be matched by AI to ingest data and prepare for system depot level/shipyard availabilities. Panel members discussed how AI-driven digital twins innovation and efficiencies connecting data mesh and twinning technologies to additive manufacturing delivery can improve the management and readiness of manpower, material, and resources needed to shorten maintenance times in public shipyards. Executive Director Whitney had a wonderful time being part of one of the nation’s largest communities of innovators and VDMC is honored to be proud of the conversations that are shaping the future of shipyard modernization and digital transformation across the Navy enterprise.
Across OERI
Several OERI team members attended this year’s Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Florida. I/ITSEC is the world’s largest and most influential event dedicated to modeling, simulation, and training (MS&T) and brings together thousands of professionals from defense, industry, academia, and international allies to explore the technologies, strategies, and partnerships that are shaping the future of training and operational readiness.
Publications
New VMASC Publication Dr. Philippe J. Giabbanelli (VMASC, Old Dominion University) and his student Anish Shrestha (then at Miami University) have published a new open-access article entitled “Are We Ready for Synchronous Conceptual Modeling in Augmented Reality? A Usability Study on Causal Maps with HoloLens 2”. Conceptual models are often built by interdisciplinary teams. Members have different expertise and perspectives on a topic, so arriving at a consensus can be a long but necessary process. To support multiple participants in creating a conceptual model together, this paper reports a usability study on an augmented reality (AR) environment built on the HoloLens 2. The usability evaluated five core collaborative modeling tasks, such as linking concepts, merging semantically related constructs, or adding new terms. This is the first usability study on how modelers can operate together (synchronous collaboration) through AR to create a conceptual model in the form of a causal map. Key takeaways: • All participants completed every task, demonstrating the feasibility of AR for essential operations in conceptual modeling. • The study separates “action time” (using the AR interface) from “discussion time” (social negotiation between collaborators), which is important to distinguish how people operate through a tool from how the tool supports them in negotiating the design of models. • Although actions may be slower than in desktop applications, AR promoted copresence and fluid verbal collaboration, suggesting that the strength of augmented reality is in enabling shared situational awareness during early brainstorming and negotiation.
Publications SATTL’s Rafi Soule Presents Paper at NDIA’s 28th Annual Systems and Mission Engineering Conference Title: Integrating Dense Information Retrieval with Mission Engineering: A HumanCentered Participatory Framework. Authors: Rafi Soule, Barry Ezell, Ph.D. Problem: Poorly framed missions cause delays, mismatched capabilities, and misaligned goals across planning and analysis in complex defense contexts. Approach: Augment Mission Engineering with BERT-based dense retrieval and a participatory, human-centered workflow to align evolving terminology and context with stakeholder intent. Concept of use: Organizational knowledge and workshop outputs are embedded into vector stores, an LLM orchestrates retrieval, and results drive refined problem statements, requirements, and capability mappings. Value: Faster, context-aware access to mission knowledge improves situational awareness, adaptability, and decision quality across system-of-systems. Next steps: Implement the MBSE + RAG + Participatory Design framework, conduct a stakeholder workshop, and advance a validated prototype; IRB approved under IRB # 2372190-3 with a 15-minute survey invitation shared.
Publications VMASC Presentation at AAAI Fall Symposium Series Researchers from the Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center (VMASC) participated in the 2025 AAAI Fall Symposium Series, held November 6– 8 at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, VA. Dr. Megan Witherow, Assistant Research Professor at VMASC, presented in the symposium “AI for Social Good: Emerging Methods, Measures, Data, and Ethics.” Her paper, “Emerging Uses of AI-Generated Images for Equitable and Transparent Simulations,” explored how generative AI imagery can promote empathy, equity, and transparency in modeling and simulation. This paper was co-authored with Drs Giabbanelli and Shoele (Florida State University). Dr. Philippe J. Giabbanelli, Research Professor at VMASC, presented in the symposium “Safe, Ethical, Certified, Uncertainty-Aware, Robust, and Explainable AI for Health.” His paper, “Towards Personalized Explanations for Health Simulations: A Mixed-Methods Framework for Stakeholder-Centric Summarization,” introduced a framework that tailors large-language-model summaries of health simulations to different stakeholder needs. This paper was co-authored with Dr Agrawal from Portland State University. The AAAI Fall Symposium Series is a prestigious annual forum organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), bringing together researchers from academia, industry, and government to discuss emerging topics in artificial intelligence.
Publications New CSICS Publication
CSICS Research Associate Professor Dr. Ross Gore, Assistant Research Professor C. Nico Barati, Project Scientist Andrew Maciejunes and Arie Croitoru from George Mason University, along with several colleagues, have pre-printed a research paper, titled “Navigating Quantum Missteps in Agent-Based Modeling: A Schelling Model Case Study.” The study shows that directly porting agent-based models, such as Schelling’s segregation model, into quantum optimization frameworks actually undermines computational efficiency by collapsing the necessary quantum superposition during intermediate state observations. Instead, the researchers reconceptualize the problem: rather than simulating agent dynamics until convergence, they compute the minimum number of agent moves needed for overall satisfaction, exploiting hidden symmetries within lollipop networks. This new classical algorithm establishes a challenging baseline, clarifying when true quantum advantage in agent-based modeling may be achievable. Read more here: https://quantumzeitgeist.com/quantum-efficiency-missteps-agentbased-modeling-undermine-computational-shows/
OERI In The News ODU Launches HEROES Initiative to Enhance Health Research for Service Members, Veterans and First Responders odu.edu November 13, 2025 In a region defined by service, the challenges that come with it hit close to home. Old Dominion University’s new HEROES Initiative is designed to honor that reality through action, connecting researchers across disciplines to study the physical, mental and social health of those who protect and serve. Short for Health Enhancement and Resiliency for those who Serve(d), the HEROES Initiative is a University-wide collaboration that unites experts from across Old Dominion University and the community. Its mission is simple and urgent: to enhance health research for those who have served their community and country. The HEROES leadership team spans across the University: Dr. Christopher Rhea, HEROES director and associate dean for research and innovation, Macon & Joan Brock Virginia Health Sciences Ellmer College of Health Sciences at Old Dominion University Hamid Okhravi, Ph.D., professor, Department of Medicine, Macon & Joan Brock Virginia Health Sciences Eastern Virginia Medical School at Old Dominion University Jim Blando, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Environmental Health, Joint School of Public Health at Old Dominion University in partnership with Norfolk State University Lobat Tayebi, Ph.D., director, Institute for Engineering in Medicine, Health, and Human Performance (EnMed), Batten College of Engineering and Technology Michelle Kelley, Ph.D., professor, Department of Psychology, College of Sciences Ross Gore, Ph.D., research associate professor, Center for Secure and Intelligent Critical Systems, Office of Enterprise Research and Innovation
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OERI In The News The ‘Dutch Dialogues’ changed Hampton Roads’ relationship with water. Ten years later, what’s next? virginiamercury.com November 6, 2025
By Katherine Hafner/WHRO A decade ago, a group of engineers and water experts from the Netherlands visited Hampton Roads and helped reshape the region’s approach to rising tides. The group met with local leaders in a series of summer 2015 workshops known as the Dutch Dialogues, sharing lessons learned from managing water in the low-lying country. The event helped inform and inspire numerous flood control projects across Hampton Roads, such as stormwater parks and reconstructed wetlands. “The original Dutch Dialogues challenged us to see water not as an enemy to defeat, but as a neighbor to live with,” Scott Smith, coastal resilience engineer with the city of Hampton, said Wednesday at a conference in downtown Norfolk. “That shift from resistance to relationship has transformed plans, projects and partnerships across the region. We’ve made real progress.” This week’s event, Dutch Dialogues: Life at Sea Level, celebrates the 10th anniversary of the landmark event and charts a path forward. Carol Considine, director of applied projects at ODU’s Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience, said the Dutch Dialogues prompted many flooding projects. To maximize time and money, the region needs to prioritize projects with broader advantages, she said, such as greenery that protects people from extreme heat, buffers pollution and absorbs excess water. “Hard conversations will hopefully happen here about how we need to be getting multiple benefits out of solutions, and not addressing one piece of climate change, which is flooding,” Considine said.
OERI In The News Privacy-aware Framework Achieves 95.2% Malware Detection in Indoor Robots Via Hybrid Quantum Computing and Deep Neural Networks quantumzeitgest.com October 21, 2025
Indoor robots, essential components of modern cyber-physical systems, face growing threats from disruptive attacks that jeopardise their functionality and data security. Tan Le, Van Le, and Sachin Shetty from Old Dominion University, present a new framework for detecting malicious software in these robots, combining the power of quantum computing with deep learning techniques. This innovative approach achieves remarkably high detection accuracy, up to 95. 2%, even while protecting sensitive privacy information, and crucially, operates without relying on pre-defined settings or continuous data collection. The research demonstrates a significant step forward in building trustworthy artificial intelligence for autonomous systems, offering robust, interpretable, and stable performance in challenging real-world environments.
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OERI In The News Class of 2025: ODU Student Turns Passion for Water into Real-World Impact odu.edu November 20, 2025
When Cydell Still chose Old Dominion University, she didn’t know that Norfolk’s coastal setting with its frequent flooding would shape her future. Now, the 23-year-old civil engineering technology major is preparing to graduate with a clear goal: helping communities manage water resources. As a leader in coastal resilience research, Old Dominion University offered her handson learning, sustainability classes, a professional internship and a senior design project on coastal resiliency. She credits these applied experiences with building her passion for water resources and community engagement. Cydell grew up in a tight-knit community in Arlington, Virginia, and is the first in her family to pursue a career in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Her parents encouraged her interest in building and, like many parents of future engineers, bought her Lego sets for Christmas. For her senior design project, Cydell worked with the University’s Institute for Coastal Adaptation & Resilience (ICAR) to address recurring flooding in Southside Norfolk neighborhoods. The project brings together students, professionals and community members to create practical, nature-based flood solutions.
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OERI In The News First-ever Virginia climate assessment raises concern over rising sea levels wavy.com November 21, 2025
NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) — The first-ever climate assessment for the state of Virginia is sounding the alarm for the Commonwealth’s coastal regions. The study out of George Mason University claims that sea levels are rising at a moderate rate currently, but could accelerate greatly in just the next few decades. “What we expect in the future, particularly after 2050, is an acceleration in that rise due to warming in the global climate system,” said Dr. Jessica Whitehead, director of Old Dominion University’s Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience and a co-author on the recent Virginia climate assessment. “Then we expect that acceleration to growth higher rates per year.”
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OERI In The News Be wary of online scams as Cyber Monday draws near wavy.com November 21, 2025
PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) – Cyber Monday is quickly approaching on December 1, and people want to find the best deals online without falling for a scam. 10 On Your Side was told if a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is, and if you’re online shopping, you should not click on the link. Sachin Shetty, Executive Director of Center for Secure and Intelligent Critical System at Old Dominion University, says if you find something in your cart you are interested in, be careful with your payment method. “If you do end up paying, please use a credit card and not a debit card, because at least with a credit card, if they do scam you, you have protection. With a debit card, if they take the money, the money’s not coming back,” said Shetty.
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Upcoming Events
Retirement Celebration for Karen Prado Thursday, January 8, 2026 Noon Large Conference Room 1201
December 2025 Internal Newsletter
ODU Office of Enterprise Research and Innovation
1030 University Blvd., Suffolk, VA 23435 oduinnovate.org