Jeff Hagen is a senior engineer at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy. His research areas include technological systems analysis and strategic policy and decisionmaking. Much of his work involves modeling and simulation of military forces, including the effects of advanced weapon systems, intelligence, command and control, and information operations. His recent publicly-available RAND publications include Assessing Progress on Air Base Defense: Past Investments and Future Options (Zeigler, et al., 2025); Denial Without Disaster—Keeping a U.S.-China Conflict over Taiwan Under the Nuclear Threshold (Goldfeld, et al., 2024); The Resilience Assessment Framework: Assessing Commercial Contributions to U.S. Space Force Mission Resilience (Osoba, et al., 2023); Modeling Rapidly Composable, Heterogeneous, and Fractionated Forces: Findings on Mosaic Warfare (Gulden et al., 2021); Air Dominance Through Machine Learning: A Preliminary Exploration of Artificial Intelligence–Assisted Mission Planning (Zhang et al., 2020).
Earlier in his career, Hagen worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA Dryden Flight Research Center and at the University of Washington, where his research focused on turbulent fluid flows. He received his M.S. in aeronautics and astronautics from the University of Washington and his B.S. in engineering and applied science from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
M.S. in aeronautics and astronautics, University of Washington; B.S. in engineering, California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
