Amado Cordova is a senior engineer at the RAND Corporation, with research aimed at answering policy questions in homeland security and national defense. He has been principal investigator in various RAND research units - Project Air Force (PAF), Arroyo Center, Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center (HSOAC), and RAND Health Care - and has led projects on subjects such on acquisition, strategic planning, identification of innovative technologies and technology roadmaps.
As examples of recent work: He led the Communications and Information Technology (Comms/IT) team for the HSOAC Puerto Rico recovery project; his team collected data, interviewed stakeholders, prepared 33 courses of action worth 3.2 billion dollars, and wrote the recovery plan for the Comms/IT sector of the island. For PAF his team assessed what improvements in timeliness, reliability and maintainability can be achieved in the Minuteman ICBM by implementing new navigation and guidance technologies. For Arroyo he worked on investigating the impacts of adopting common architectures within the Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program. He was member of the modeling team of COMPARE (Comprehensive Assessment of Reform Efforts) to analyze the impact of the Affordable Care Act.
Prior to RAND he was Chief Technology Officer of Copley Networks, California. Before that, at Litton Industries, he and his team designed and developed the world-most-robust fiber-optic gyroscopes for military and other applications. For his contributions he received Litton's C. Thornton Advanced Technology Award. He earned a Ph.D. in EE from Stanford University, a Diplome d'Ingenieur from SUPELEC (France) and a B.S. in Physics from UAM (Mexico). He is author or coauthor of 23 U.S. patents and of over 50 publications (RAND reports and journal articles).
Ph.D. in electrical engineering, Stanford University; M.S. in electrical engineering, Stanford University; Diplome d'ingenieur in electrical engineering, Ecole Superieure d'Electricite; B.S. in physics, Univ. Autonoma Metropolitana
