ITSD Research Staff

Thomas H. Barth
Research Staff Member
Tom Barth came to IDA after 29 years of service in the U.S. Army, where he attained the rank of colonel before retiring in 2012. A career infantry officer, Tom’s last assignment on active duty was with U.S. Army Cyber Command, where he served as the chief of future operations. Since joining IDA, Tom has focused on issues related to cyberspace operations and other joint warfighting topics. Tom’s work at IDA has also addressed issues related to information and communication technology supply chain security, cyber workforce development and the analysis of cyberspace policies. Tom has a master’s degree in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College; a master’s degree in military art and science from the School of Advanced Military Studies, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College; and a bachelor’s degree in general engineering/mechanical engineering from the U.S. Military Academy. Tom was also a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Seminar XXI Fellow in 2009.

Michael P. Fischerkeller, Ph.D.
Research Staff Member
Michael Fischerkeller has spent 25 years supporting the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Combatant Commands, and Multi-National Force commanders. His areas of expertise are cyber strategy and strategic and operational concept development and assessment. He has authored and co-authored dozens of publications on cyber strategy, including numerous essays in national media, articles in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and the book “Cyber Persistence Theory: Redefining National Security in Cyberspace.” Michael holds a doctorate in international relations from the Ohio State University, and he received IDA’s 2008 Andrew J. Goodpaster Award for Excellence in Research and IDA’s 2018 Larry D. Welch Award for Best External Publication.

Claire E. Haas
Research Associate
Claire Haas joined ITSD in 2020 and has since provided analysis on sanctions policy, foreign influence and technology exploitation, global supply chains and policy congruency analysis for the Department of Defense and other agencies. She also provided policy insights to emerging technology-focused venture capital firm Paladin Capital Group and helped author an investment thesis on technology protecting online users from harmful content, contact, and conduct. Prior to joining IDA, Claire worked with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) to develop training materials on establishing patterns of behavior to potentially designate groups as terrorist organizations. She also worked domestically and abroad with the U.S. Department of State focused on the East and Southeast Asian regions. She holds a master’s degree in international security and economic policy, a bachelor’s degree in economics, and a bachelor’s degree in political science, all from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Arun S. Maiya, Ph.D.
Research Staff Member
Arun Maiya is a computer scientist whose research interests focus broadly on computational methods to extract meaning from raw data and include the areas of machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, data mining and network science. His work has been published in top-tier computer science venues, and he has served as a program committee member and reviewer for many academic conferences and journals, including the ACM SIGKDD conference and Nature Communications. A builder of data tools, Arun has created software packages for solving a wide range of problems across different disciplines. He received IDA’s 2021 Andrew J. Goodpaster Award for Excellence in Research, IDA’s 2016 Larry D. Welch Award for Best External Publication, and the Association for Enterprise Information’s 2015 Award for Excellence in Enterprise Information. Arun holds a doctorate in computer science from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Laura A. Odell
Assistant Director
Laura Odell develops and manages critical projects for the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and the Department of State. She received IDA’s 2019 Andrew J. Goodpaster Award for Excellence in Research for her work using state-of-the-art techniques to illuminate foreign influence and technology exploitation. In support of the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, Laura provided strategy and technical expertise on proposed mergers and acquisitions to the White House. Before joining IDA, she was a partner at KPMG LLP, where she was responsible for the global Defense Department account and led the deployment of the global supply chain offering in the United States. Laura began her career as an electrical engineer in the microelectronics sector. She has served in federal government positions, including deputy program manager for the F/A-18 fighter aircraft program, contracts head for the Navy Facilities Engineering Command, congressional liaison for the Naval Air Test Center and the Base Re-Alignment and Closure Commission, and flight test engineer for the Navy’s Strike Aircraft Test Directorate.

Daniel J. Radack, Ph.D.
Assistant Director
Dan Radack analyzes technologies and develops solutions to challenging problems related to microelectronics for U.S. government applications. His primary focus is semiconductor technologies and assured microelectronics. Dan was previously a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects. While there, he developed a portfolio of microelectronics research and development programs that advanced high-performance semiconductor technologies by providing foundational advances to the state of art in manufacturing, advanced devices and circuits, hardening, and integration technologies. He also previously worked for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he studied dynamic test circuits and semiconductor metrology. Dan holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, and he is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Margaret Zientek, Ph.D.
Research Staff Member
Margaret Zientek develops software to extract information from large raw document sets and uses data science to inform cyber policy for the Department of Defense. Before she joined IDA, Margaret worked as technical staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory, developing physics-based models of surveillance and tactical systems. Previous to that, she was a graduate student researcher looking for dark matter and developing detector firmware for the Large Hadron Collider at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. She holds a doctorate in particle physics from Cornell University and a bachelor’s degree in physics from Rutgers University.