Operations Research Department
Naval Postgraduate School
Monterey, California 93943

Office: GL-258
(831) 656-1814
DSN: 756-1814
Fax: (831) 656-2595
Email: dlalders@nps.edu

DAVID L. ALDERSON
AssOCIATE Professor of Operations Research
Ph.D., Stanford University, 2003

David L. Alderson, Ph.D, joined the Naval Postgraduate School faculty in 2006 after working for three years as a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He received a B.S.E. in Civil Engineering and Operations Research from Princeton University and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. His research focuses on the function and operation of critical infrastructures, with particular emphasis on how to invest limited resources to ensure efficient and resilient performance in the face of accidents, failures, natural disasters, or deliberate attacks. He currently serves as the Director of the NPS Center for Infrastructure Defense (CID). As part of a Multiple University Research Initiative (MURI) team studying "Next-Generation Network Science," he studies tradeoffs between efficiency, complexity, and fragility in a wide variety of public and private network-centric systems. He has extensive experience working on the Internet and other complex communication networks, having been a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA. He is a member of INFORMS and MORS, and holds a SECRET clearance.

Research Interests

• Modeling, analysis, and management of the Internet and other network-centric infrastructures
• Optimization-based reverse engineering of complex network systems
• Attacker-Defender Models for Critical Infrastructure Systems
• Hastily Formed Networks and Network Operation, particularly related to Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HA/DR)

Teaching Interests

• Computational methods for Operations Research
• A realistic view of Complex Systems/Network Science

What's New

• D. L. Alderson and J. C. Doyle. Contrasting Views of Complexity and Their Implications for Network-Centric Infrastructures IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans 40(4): 839-852, July 2010.
• Danger: Infrastructure Under Attack (Science of Better Podcast with David Alderson)
• NPS Center for Infrastructure Defense announced in NPS Research Quarterly
• NPS Cyber Summit, 29 October 2009
• "In Search of the Real Network Science: An Interview with David Alderson"
  ACM Ubiquity Issue 8 (August 4 - 10, 2009).
• W. Willinger, D. Alderson, and J.C. Doyle. Mathematics and the Internet: A source of enormous confusion and great potential, Notices of the American Mathematical Society 56(5):286-299, May 2009.
• D. Alderson. Catching the “Network Science” Bug: Insight and Opportunity for the Operations Researcher. Operations Research 56, pp. 1047-1065, 2008.