Award Recipients

Ernest McDuffie

2011 Government Leadership Award

Dr. Ernest McDuffie is the Associate Director of the National Coordination Office (NCO) for Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD). His appointment as the Associate Director of the NCO comes after joining the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a Computer Scientist in their Information Technology Laboratory, Office of Federal and Industrial Relations.

In August 2006, Dr. McDuffie joined the NCO where he served as the Technical Coordinator for the Cyber Security and Information Assurance (CSIA) Interagency Working Group (IWG), Federal Agency Administration of Science and Technology Education and Research (FASTER) Committee of Practice (CoP), and the Software Design and Productivity (SDP) Coordination Group (CG).

Prior to joining the NCO, Dr. McDuffie served as the Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) – Science and Technology for America's Readiness (N-STAR) Initiative. He served as the Lead Program Director for the Federal Cyber Service: Scholarship for Service (SFS) Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF).

He served as an Assistant Professor at Florida State University in the Department of Computer Science for both graduate and undergraduate students for seven years. His research interests and activities were mainly in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI), focusing on temporal reasoning, expert systems, neural networks, automatic scheduling, and other hybrid AI techniques applied to many different real world problem domains cyber security and information assurance. He is a published author of numerous journal, conference, and technical research papers, and has presented his work at both national and international computer science conferences. Dr. McDuffie has participated in software engineering projects for the U.S. Air Force, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Federal Aviation Administration, Lockheed missiles and Space Company, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the National Security Agency.

Dr. McDuffie received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida. He is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow and was a founding member of the Florida's Institute of Technology's Zeta Chapter of Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the International Honor Society for the Computing Sciences.