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
Director, NPS Center for Infrastructure Defense
Ph.D., Stanford University, 2003

David Alderson is an Associate Professor in the Operations Research Department and serves as Director for the Center for Infrastructure Defense at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). He is also a member of the NPS Cyber Academic Group, which has academic oversight of interdisciplinary cyber curricula on campus.

Dr. Alderson's 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. His research explores tradeoffs between efficiency, complexity, and fragility in a wide variety of public and private cyber-physical systems.

Dr. Alderson has been the Principal Investigator of sponsored research projects for the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard.

Dr. Alderson received his doctorate from Stanford University and his undergraduate degree from Princeton University. He has held research positions at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the University of California Los Angeles, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and the Santa Fe Institute. He has extensive industry experience and has worked for several venture-back startup companies. His early career was spent developing technology at Goldman Sachs & Co. in New York City.

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
• Resiliency of Cyber-Physical Systems

Teaching Interests

• Computational methods for Operations Research
• Critical Infrastructure Systems and Their Defense
• A realistic view of Complex Systems/Network Science

Most Requested

• Alderson, D.L., Brown, G.G., Carlyle, W.M., and Wood, R.K., 2011, Solving Defender-Attacker-Defender Models for Infrastructure Defense, in Operations Research, Computing, and Homeland Defense, R.K. Wood and R.F. Dell, editors, INFORMS, Hanover, MD, pp. 28-49.
• 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)
• "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.