AESE Faculty

Dr. Harold W. Sorenson is a founding faculty member of UCSD, and is currently a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering. From 1989 to 2001, Dr. Sorenson served as Sr. Vice President and General Manager for the MITRE Corporation, a non-profit organization that applies systems engineering and advanced technologies to address challenges in system development and enterprise modernization for the defense and intelligence communities as well as for the Federal Aviation Administration and Internal Revenue Service. He chaired the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board from 1990-1993 and was the Chief Scientist of the U.S. Air Force from 1985-1988.

Dr. Jon Wade, is a professor of practice of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering where he is the director of convergent systems engineering.  Previously, Dr. Wade was a research professor in the School of Systems and Enterprises at the Stevens Institute of Technology where he served as the associate dean of research, the director of the systems and software engineering division, and the chief technology officer of the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) UARC. His industrial experience includes positions as executive vice president of Engineering at International Game Technology (IGT), senior director of Enterprise Server Development at Sun Microsystems and director of Advanced System Development at Thinking Machines Corporation.  Dr. Wade received his S.B., S.M., E.E. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Dr. Wade is an INCOSE Fellow. 

Alexander Zak, Ph.D. is an award winning faculty member at UCSD, who teaches a broad range of graduate courses at the Rady School of Management, the Jacobs School of Engineering, and the School of Theater and Dance. He is a thought leader, a trusted adviser and an educator, with a broad range of global experience in building leadership capacity to solve complex business problems, develop insight, execute and drive change. His expertise is in creating business value by orchestrating experiential learning, consulting and coaching engagements focused on visionary outcomes. Zak holds a doctorate in engineering and masters in management. His work and research is in strategic problem solving methodologies, management of complexity in enterprise systems and development of executive leadership capacity. Zak is fluent in English and Russian and is certified in MBTI ®. Zak has taught, coached and served clients, within some of the world's leading multinational corporations and professional service firms for over a decade, including: McKinsey & Co., Booz Allen Hamilton, Egon Zehender, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Warburg Pincus, Permira, Cisco, EMC, Avaya, ViaSat, Ericsson, Infosys, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Ford Motor Co., Caterpillar, Ingersoll Rand, Disney, Genentech, CB&I, Skanska and Cargill.

Thomas Roemer is a Senior Lecturer in Operations Management at the Sloan School of Management at MIT and has served as the Executive Director of the Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) Program since July 2014. He has taught classes in operations management and strategy, product design and development, quantitative analysis, and business ethics. From 2000 to 2006, Roemer was an Assistant Professor at MIT Sloan, where he served as the first MIT-Ford Faculty Fellow and was named the Robert N. Noyce Assistant Professor in Operations Management. From 2006 to 2014, he was on the faculty at the Rady School of Management at the University of California at San Diego, where he helped create the Architecture-based Enterprise Systems Engineering (AESE) Program. He also served as associate director of the Program. He has won numerous teaching awards at the Rady School and, in 2009, received the award for “Outstanding Faculty Teaching” from the Graduate Student Association at UCSD. Professor Roemer received a Diplom-Ingenieur degree from the Technische Universität Berlin and his PhD from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.

Dr. Alexander H. Levis is University Professor of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering and heads the System Architectures Laboratory of the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. From 2001 to 2004 he served as the Chief Scientist of the U.S. Air Force, on leave from GMU. He was educated at MIT where he received the BS (1965), MS (1965), ME (1967), and Sc.D. (1968) degrees in Mechanical Engineering with control systems as his area of specialization. He also attended Ripon College where he received the AB degree (1963) in Mathematics and Physics. Dr. Levis is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and past president of the IEEE Control Systems Society; a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a Fellow of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE); an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA); and serves on the board of the Educational Foundation of AFCEA. He has received three times the Exceptional Civilian Service medal and once the Meritorious Civilian Service medal from the Air Force (1994, 2001, 2004, 2008) for contributions as a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board and as Chief Scientist. He has also received the Air Force Chief's Medallion and the Third Millennium medal from IEEE. He serves on several advisory boards.

Ken is the Vice President of Solutions Engineering and Architecture at the nonprofit Compassion. Ken has more than 20 years of experience in high-tech and national defense leadership.

He most recently served as the chief technologist for Gloo, where he led the development of the first personal growth platform serving the faith community. Prior to Gloo, he held senior technical leadership positions with the MITRE Corporation, leading the U.S. Navy’s transformation to the cloud and modernizing thousands of apps.

He also served as chief architect at Cisco, where he conceptualized and led the development of their services platform (generating $6.5 billion annually).

Dr. Ingolf Krueger is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department of UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering, where he directs the "Service-Oriented Software and Systems Engineering Laboratory" (S3EL). He also directs the "Software & Systems Architecture & Integration" (SAINT) functional area within the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Dr. Krueger's major research interests are service-oriented software & systems engineering for distributed, reactive systems, software architectures, description techniques, verification & validation, and development processes.

 Dr. Joseph Engelberg's research focuses on the way information is disseminated among market participants, especially by financial media and social networks. Engelberg earned his Ph.D. in Finance from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and earned his B.A. in Mathematics and B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Southern California. Prior to coming to the Rady School, Engelberg was an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.