ADELPHI, Md. (Feb. 27, 2018) - The U.S. Army inducted the newest member to its Senior Executive Service today during a ceremony at the Adelphi Laboratory Center.
Cynthia (Cindy) M. Bedell, director of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory's Computational and Information Sciences Directorate, took the oath of office during an SES pinning and induction ceremony hosted by Maj. Gen. Cedric T. Wins, commanding general of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command.
As the CISD director, Bedell is responsible for basic and applied research Network and Information Sciences, Cyber Defense, High Performance Computing and Battlefield Environments. She has technical oversight of the state-of-the art high performance computing assets, computational capabilities, and wide area networking methodologies for ARL, DA and DOD. CISD's scientific research focuses on efforts that create, exploit and harvest innovative technologies to enable knowledge superiority for the Warfighter, and that provide the strategic, operational, and tactical information dominance across the spectrum of operations. ARL is the U.S. Department of the Army's corporate laboratory, strategically placed within RDECOM and the U.S. Army Materiel Command.
Previously, as the regional lead for ARL West, the lab's regional office in California. Bedell established ARL West as the first extended campus for the U.S. Army Research Lab to make ARL and its researchers more accessible to academia as well as business research leaders on the west coast.
Bedell brings with her 30 years of military experience. Before her military retirement, then-Col. Bedell led the U.S. Army RDECOM Forward Element Command - Atlantic in searching across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, for applicable technologies to support current and future warfighters. She also served as the director of Science and Technology Support for Current Operations for the System of Systems Integration Office, RDECOM.
She helped develop science and technology strategies to allow the Army to address technology shortfalls in current and future war-fighting systems. As product manager, Sensors and Lasers, she was responsible for the Soldier-borne night vision devices, thermal sensors and sights and laser pointers, rangefinders and designators. She accelerated the engineering design cycles for a number of systems; to include the Enhanced Night Vision Goggle and the 25 micron Vanadium Oxide-based Thermal Weapons Sight.
She earned both a bachelor's and a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She served as assistant professor in the Civil and Mechanical Engineering Department at the U.S. Military Academy. She attended the University of Texas, as a Senior Service College Fellow in lieu of the Army War College. She holds United States Patent 5,413,649, with Dr. David Dunand for a method to enhance superplasticity for ease in forming complex composites in materials that undergo phase transformation.
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The U.S. Army Research Laboratory is part of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, which has the mission to provide innovative research, development and engineering to produce capabilities that provide decisive overmatch to the Army against the complexities of the current and future operating environments in support of the joint warfighter and the nation. RDECOM is a major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Materiel Command.