Ethan Boone ’17

Wins MORS Stephen A. Tisdale Award

by Caitlyn Creasy

Ethan, who recently graduated from the Naval Postgraduate School, won the Military Operations Research Society (MORS) Stephen A. Tisdale Award for Graduate Research during the Fall 2022 quarter.

Upon graduating from Gunston, Ethan Boone ’17 joined the Naval ROTC program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. There, he graduated magna cum laude with a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and won the Military Operations Research Society (MORS) Stephen A. Tisdale Award for Graduate Research.

The Tisdale Award is presented quarterly to the Operations Research graduate whose thesis research presents the greatest potential for near-term impact on the security of the U.S. and its allies. Ethan’s project applied two different machine learning algorithms to the publicly-available Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) Project in an effort to identify what features are most important in predicting when an area is going to have an increase in violent events with fatalities.

“Using machine learning on the ACLED database, we were able to create models that provide these features to the stakeholders,” explained Ethan. “Additionally, we were able to provide a monthly prediction of whether an area is going to have an increase or decrease in violent events. Stakeholders were particularly excited about the insights that were provided that would not have been accessible when the data was in its raw format. [...] I was immediately drawn into [this particular] project because