JOHN SHULL OERI 8 YEARS
JOSEPH KOSTECZKO OERI 7 YEARS
Employment Recognitions
ALEXXIS HUTCHINSON
6 YEARS 3 YEARS
WILLIAM VARNIER
Monthly Awards & Proposals
VISA Welcomes Students to MAST
September 19, 2025
On September 19, the VISA team welcomed senior students from the Mechanical Engineering and Electrical & Computer Engineering departments to the newly opened Maritime Autonomous Systems Test Site (MAST).
Students had the opportunity to operate the BlueBoat unmanned surface vehicle (USV) and explore its capabilities, including optimal speed, radio range, manual and autonomous modes, and failsafe features. They also gained hands-on experience by setting waypoints and observing the BlueBoat navigate autonomously.
To ensure a safe and successful test, the VISA/ODU research vessel was on site to closely monitor the BlueBoat and provide support in case of failures though none occurred.
CME Hosts International Mission Engineering and Integration Workshop September 27, 2025
CME held a Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division Mission Engineering and Integration (ME&I) Workshop, September 23-26.
25 participants across multiple Departments truly reflected the interdisciplinary approach which is foundational to Mission Engineering. They organized themselves into teams that were productive, insightful, entertaining and delivered quality Mission Engineering products that both addressed the assignments and advanced their mission thinking.
CME is looking forward to the next ME&I Workshop in the Spring. NSWC DD’s recognition of the importance of workforce development to advance and operationalize Mission Engineering across the Warfare Center is inspiring.
Following the ME&I Workshop, five of the NSWC DD participants took on five University of New South Wales (UNSW) representatives in the Inaugural International Mission Engineering and Integration Hackathon.
The teams had six hours to Mission Engineer a maritime response to a Humanitarian Assistance Disaster Relief (HADR) scenario; Operation Pacific Shelter.
To foster allied innovation and deepen US-Australia mission engineering interoperability, this hackathon concluded with a joint presentation session co-hosted by UNSW Capability System Centre and the ODU Center for Mission Engineering.
During the Joint Showcase, the teams presented their solutions during a live, virtual joint session bringing together participants, mentors, and defense stakeholders from both nations. The session aimed to surface comparative approaches, identify shared strengths and gaps, and promote ongoing trans-Pacific mission engineering collaboration.
In an extremely close contest, the NSWC DD team (The Dahlgren Dingoes) were selected as the winning team.
Across OERI
ICAR Presentation
October 6, 2025
On October 6, Andrew Larkin, the ICAR Assistant Director for Engagement delivered a presentation on “The Promise and Limits of Nature-Based Solutions” at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Conservation Partners Gathering in Virginia Beach. The Conservation Partners are a network dedicated to advancing nature-based solutions for water quality and flooding challenges facing coastal Virginia.
Larkin spoke about the benefits and challenges of using living shorelines to reduce erosion, rain gardens and bioswales for stormwater management, and dredge material as a technique for elevating coastal marshes that are threatened by sea level rise.
With these outcomes:
Accelerate time-to-decision through streamlined digital scenario planning
Improve alignment between operations, acquisition, and sustainment across the Lifecycle
Enable risk-informed, user-driven transformation of mission planning systems
Support emerging acquisition reform and DoW digital engineering objectives
By fusing digital engineering with maturity models and operational narratives, CME plans to empower decision-makers with the clarity, agility, and trust needed to execute complex missions with confidence. Its expanded toolbox reinforces ODU’s applied research leadership in mission engineering, performance improvement, and national defense digital transformation.
Across OERI
CME Webinar
October 7, 2025
CME’s Executive Director Thomas Irwin, PhD, had the pleasure of presenting a free webinar on Mission Engineering for the American Society of Naval Engineers (ASNE).
During the session, Dr. Irwin covered Mission Engineering’s baselining core competencies, architectures, roles, and knowledge areas. He also outlined how the Mission Engineering framework supports strategic planning, professional development, and recruitment.
In addition, he highlighted the foundational 2025 Mission Engineering Competencies Workshop, which focused on a new ME Competencies Framework and on building a shared understanding of the skills, roles, and workforce competencies essential to the practice of Mission Engineering across the United States Department of War, NASA, academia, industry, and allied partners. (ASNE's prestigious Naval Engineering Journal plans to publish a summary of the formal Workshop Report in a forthcoming Journal publication.)
The event concluded with an engaging Q&A session, where participants raised thoughtful questions and shared valuable perspectives.
To see the entire webinar, visit https://www.navalengineers org/MissionEngineering1
Across OERI
VDMC and OERI Celebrate US Navy and Marine Corps’ 250 Anniversary in Philadelphia th October 9, 2025
VDMC and OERI team members were in Philadelphia to celebrate the US Navy and United States Marine Corps’ 250th anniversary. They were there to support the Maritime Industrial Base Program (MIB) in their workforce development efforts to highlight maritime careers, especially trades and engineering, at the three-day Innovation Pavilion event, hosted at Cherry Street Pier.
During the event organized by DVIRC, VDMC and OERI team members were set up at the Build Giants booth to showcase the Maritime Education Hub and Maritime Training Hub. They engaged attendees with a hands-on pipefitting activity and a touchscreen holographic pipefitting game designed by ODU students and faculty. Both activities emphasized math, measurement, and the interpretation of technical drawings.
On Saturday, dozens of middle and high school students were there for the STEM Fair and STEM competitions. Many of these students stopped by the Build Giants booth to see all the latest technology and take part in the hands-on activities.
VDMC and OERI team members even got the chance to climb aboard Princeton University's electric boat, the fastest in the world!
Across OERI
ICAR Community Resilience Workshop
October 9, 2025
ICAR led a community resilience workshop in Yorktown on October 9th for approximately 20 York County residents, as part of the Resilience Adaptation Feasibility Tool - or RAFT.
Executive Director Dr. Jessica Whitehead facilitated the meeting, while Trang Le presented and provided coordination support, and Andrew Larkin led small group discussions. ICAR’s RAFT partner Wendy Stout, PhD from Virginia Tech also presented and supported small group discussions. The York County residents who participated in the meeting received an update on the results of a resilience assessment by the RAFT team, led by the ODU School of Public Service. Community members broke out into smaller groups to identify resilience priorities to implement over the coming year.
During this implementation phase, ICAR will be supporting the priorities identified by York County, including incorporating NOAA: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's sea level rise projections into the county’s flood resilience plan.
Quantum Hackathon
October 9-12, 2025
Project Scientist Andrew Maciejunes competed in the South Carolina Quantum Hackathon, where his team won first place!
The challenge was to classify tornadoes into EF categories based on an incredibly dataset engineered specifically to impede the participants. The main focus was preventing false positives and correctly identifying strong tornadoes.
“To address the dataset imbalance, we implemented quantum kernel estimation. The idea was simple: Our QNN could distinguish between "weak" and "strong" tornadoes. Then, the quantum kernel, trained on the small 300 samples, can be run on any "strong" tornadoes to classify as "evacuation level strong" or just "strong,” Andrew said.
Andrew’s team won the technical category due to their understanding of the problem and ability to approach it in clever and effective ways. Their team will get to compete in a quantum hackathon in April 2026.
Virginia Tech Convene
Inaugural Tornado & Straight-Line Wind Summit
October 15, 2025
Pictured: Organizing Committee – Joshua Behr, Monica Arul, Kaleen Lawsure, Wie Yusuf
Emergency managers, researchers, utility leaders and community partners from across Virginia gathered in Isle of Wight County for the inaugural Tornado & Straight-Line Wind Summit a first-of-its-kind event focused on mitigating the risks posed by extreme wind in Virginia.
Organized by faculty from Old Dominion University’s Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center (VMASC) and School of Public Service, in collaboration with Virginia Tech’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the daylong summit featured presentations from leading meteorologists, emergency management professionals and planners who explored Virginia’s distinctive wind patterns, strategies for effective risk communication and approaches to strengthening infrastructure and community preparedness.
“This summit brought together a wide range of stakeholders to discuss the impacts of severe winds and, more importantly, to identify practical steps and solutions to lessen the risks they pose to Virginia’s people and infrastructure,” said Shawn Talmadge of Dominion Energy, a major sponsor of the event.
Dr. Joshua Behr of ODU’s VMASC reflected on the summit’s broader significance. “This event was an important step in raising awareness and building a community of interest around severe wind hazards in Virginia,” he said. “It made the sciences of meteorology and engineering accessible while highlighting practical actions communities can take.”
Summit co-lead organizer Dr. Monica Arul of Virginia Tech’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering underscored the importance of addressing non-hurricane wind hazards. “It’s time to move from what the weather will be to what the weather can do and how we can reduce its impact on our most vulnerable communities,” she said.
From a national perspective, Robert Myers, director of Emergency Management for Butler County, Missouri, emphasized the value of shared knowledge. “Severe winds pose real and persistent threats to the safety and well-being of citizens across the country,” he said. “This summit is collaboration at its best in service of citizens.”
. Old Dominion University,
Across OERI
VDMC’s Serious Game Named Finalist in 2025 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge October 16, 2025
VDMC’s Senior Project Scientist Gul Ayaz submitted a serious game in the 2025 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge and has been selected as a finalist! The game - “Cyber H₂O” - is an interactive learning game that puts players in the role of cybersecurity professionals protecting a public water system from digital threats. Through hands-on gameplay, it teaches how cyber resilience and teamwork keep critical infrastructure safe.
All finalist games will be showcased at the SGS&C booth at the NTSA Interservice / Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in December in Orlando, FL.
The water simulation game began as an initiative supported by the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Experiential Learning Program, which funds projects that prepare Virginia students for successful careers in cybersecurity.
The core development and research were done by ODU’s Katherine Smith, Rafael Diaz and Gul Ayaz with input from collaborators who supported testing and refinement.
Across OERI
Monarchs Give Back President’s Challenge Champions
October 17, 2025
DivRED officially won the President’s Challenge in this year’s Monarchs Give Back Campaign!
Thanks to your generosity, teamwork, and spirit of giving, we’re bringing home the title for the second year in a row…BACK-TOBACK CHAMPS!
Your kindness and willingness to support this university-wide effort made all the difference. This win reflects who we are, a team that shows up, gives back, and leads with heart.
Congrats again, Team OERI!
Across OERI
Research Program Workshop
October 23, 2025
The Storymodelers and Macon & Jo Brock Virginia Health Scienc launched a transdisciplina research program providing medic students with hands-on resear experience. Drs. Krzyszt Rechowicz, Jose Padilla, and Eri Frydenlund guided four studen through exploring how AI an storytelling enhance medic education and compassion in patie care.
During Workshop #1, the team welcomed Dr. Carrie Elzie, Professor of Anatomy at Alice L. Walton School of Medicine and longtime Storymodelers collaborator. She presented the pilot project focused on generating AI narratives about anatomical donors, centered on Mr. Clark's story. Over the coming year, students will design an AI system creating respectful, medically valid donor narratives. Supported by the Professional Enrichment and Growth Grant, this partnership creates sustainable pathways for cutting-edge interdisciplinary research.
Where Clinical Insight Meets Computational Innovation
Across OERI
Launching the Hampton Roads Playbook
October 29, 2025
VISA’s Executive Director Yiannis Papelis, Ph.D., was on the all-star industry panel at the unveiling of the "Hampton Roads Playbook" - a dynamic roadmap designed to supercharge our region’s economy by concentrating on what we do better than anyone else: defense, energy, aerospace, and logistics.
The shared strategy, by the Hampton Roads Alliance, plans to align Hampton Roads' strengths to lead the next era of growth and innovation!
To see more on the Playbook, visit https://hamptonroadsplaybook.com/
ICAR Team Members Presented Research
ICAR faculty member Wai Yan Siu, Ph.D., and her Old Dominion University colleague Rex Sitti, Ph.D., presented their ongoing research project Coastal Flooding and Housing Market Liquidity: Policy Implications for Eastern U.S. Communities at the ODU Strome College of Business annual Real Estate Research Symposium.
The project is examining the effects of tidal flooding on the liquidity of East Coast real estate market prices, or the ability to quickly convert a home into cash at its full market value without a substantial price reduction.
This is an important policy issue because homeowners can be stuck carrying substantial unwanted costs with an unsold home including continued mortgage payments, property taxes, insurance premiums, and maintenance expenses.
In their preliminary findings, Siu and Sitti learned that coastal flooding causes measurable delays in property transactions, determining that:
-For every 1% increase in likelihood that a property will flood, the property will spend an additional 1.4 days on the market
3
-Properties located in ZIP codes with a 10% flood exposure- the average in their sampletend to stay on the market longer (by 14 days), resulting in an extra $1,600 to $3,300 in ongoing expenses incurred by the property owner until the home is sold
-The potential impact on the larger housing market is significant - along the U.S. East Coast, approximately $0.8 to $1.6 billion is tied up in properties that are more difficult to sell due to flooding risks
-Flood risk disclosure could help improve property market liquidity.
Drs. Sachin Shetty and Neda Moghim (CSICS)
Publish
Paper in 2025
International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC)
F. Afrin, N. Moghim, S. Shetty, “ResGCN: A Scalable, Robust and Efficient Approach for Radio Fingerprinting”, ICNC 2025, Hawaii, USA
Abstract:
Radio fingerprinting is a technique that distinguishes wireless devices by exploiting the unique hardware imperfections present in radio frequency (RF) signals. As wireless communication systems become increasingly complex and widely adopted, the need for accurate radio fingerprinting has intensified. Existing methods, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have been widely used for the identification of wireless devices due to their ability to enhance accuracy. However, these methods have significant drawbacks. One major limitation is their reliance on large, labeled datasets for effective training, which can be both difficult and expensive to acquire. Additionally, CNNs struggle significantly to maintain consistent performance across varying temporal conditions, particularly in crossday scenarios where RF signal characteristics may shift due to environmental changes, device aging, or other temporal factors. This inconsistency undermines the reliability and practicality of CNNs in real-world applications. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel approach using Residual Graph Convolutional Networks (ResGCNs). ResGCNs are particularly adept at modeling graph-structured data, enabling them to capture intricate spatial and temporal dependencies within Inphase and Quadrature (I/Q) samples from wireless channels. Our results demonstrate that, ResGCNs not only achieve an impressive 96% accuracy in channel identification using 80% less data compared to CNNs but also achieves a notable 72.35% accuracy in cross-day scenarios, outperforming the CNNs under the same conditions. These findings underscore the potential of ResGCNs as a more efficient and scalable solution for radio fingerprinting.
Jessica Johnson Presenting Papers
VDMC’s Jessica Johnson, Ph.D. is presenting two peer-reviewed research papers at the 22nd International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age in November in Porto, Portugal.
Paper 1: "Assessing the Transfer of Macrocognitive Skills from Virtual Reality Simulations to Real-World Training Environments"
Paper 2: "The Role of Technology-Enhanced Simulations in Refining Learners' Mental Models for Complex Decision Making"
OERI In The News
Naval innovation gets spotlighted during Homecoming 250 celebration
6abc.com
October 10, 2025
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (WPVI) -- As Philadelphia celebrates the history of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, the 'Innovation Pavilion' shared a glimpse of the future of careers and technology.
The three-day event hosted at Cherry Street Pier was part of the Homecoming 250 celebration and sponsored by the Delaware Valley Industrial Resource Center (DVIRC).
The event put a spotlight on many of the DVIRC's client companies that supply the U.S. Navy with technology and parts.
Through various booths and demonstrations, the public could learn about these companies and innovative technologies.
In addition, students could learn about potential careers in the maritime industrial base, such as welding, ship and submarine building, and more.
The Innovation Pavilion concluded on October 11, 2025. However, there are many more celebrations planned in Philadelphia for the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.
OERI In The News
Old Dominion University, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, and William & Mary Awarded Oceanic and Atmospheric Research Sea Grant College Program
Funding for Oyster Aquaculture Innovation
Old Dominion University (ODU) and William & Mary’s Batten School & VIMS and Institute for Integrative Conservation have been awarded competitive funding from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Sea Grant to advance sustainable aquaculture through an innovative bird deterrence project for oyster farms.
The proposal, Innovative Avian Deterrence Strategies for Sustainable Aquaculture, is a university collaborative initiative that addresses the challenges in managing bird interactions with shellfish farming that threaten both farm productivity and environmental health.
This project unites the expertise of:
ODU’s Office of Enterprise Research and Innovation (OERI) with the Virginia Institute for Spaceflight and Autonomy (VISA) leading the development of autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, and maritime technology.
W&M’s Batten School of Coastal & Marine Sciences & VIMS bringing aquaculture knowledge and direct engagement with oyster farmers through their Commercial Shellfish Aquaculture Lab & Team (C-SALT).
W&M’s Institute for Integrative Conservation contributing bird ecology insights and conservation expertise.
Together, the partners will design, test, and implement an avian deterrent system that integrates technologies such as: Sonic-Net acoustic technology, semiautonomous boats, listening devices, AI-driven cameras, and more. The goal is to reduce and deter bird roosting on and near oyster farms while safeguarding ecosystems and ensuring compliance with national shellfish sanitation standards.
“This project demonstrates the power of collaboration across institutions,” said John Shull, Principal Investigator at ODU. “By combining aquaculture expertise, conservation science, and technological innovation, we are creating solutions that work for farmers regulators, and the environment.”
OERI In The News
Privacy-aware Framework Achieves 95.2% Malware Detection in Indoor Robots Via Hybrid Quantum Computing and Deep Neural Networks odu.edu
October 21, 2025
Indoor robots, essential components of modern cyber-physical systems, face growing threats from disruptive attacks that jeopardise their functionality and data security. Tan Le, Van Le, and Sachin Shetty from Old Dominion University, present a new framework for detecting malicious software in these robots, combining the power of quantum computing with deep learning techniques. This innovative approach achieves remarkably high detection accuracy, up to 95. 2%, even while protecting sensitive privacy information, and crucially, operates without relying on pre-defined settings or continuous data collection. The research demonstrates a significant step forward in building trustworthy artificial intelligence for autonomous systems, offering robust, interpretable, and stable performance in challenging real-world environments.
Upcoming Events
Upcoming Events
Mark your calendars for our OERI Holiday Party! This event will take place on Thursday, December 11 at noon.
2025 Holiday Wreath Decorating Contest
This year, we’re spreading cheer with a 20-inch Holiday Wreath Decorating Contest! Each team may include up to 4 members!
Contest Guidelines: Wreaths are 20 inches in diameter (photo attached for reference). Your wreath should be designed to hang on a door, as they may be displayed this way during the contest.
Get creative! Think sparkle, texture, holiday spirit, and team personality.
This contest is open to our Secured Research and ITS team members located in the building who wish to participate.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Let’s make this season merry, bright, and full of creativity…one wreath at a time!
Happy Decorating!
