John G. Blitch

John is an award-winning research scientist and former professor with a diverse wealth of experience as a small business owner, corporate Vice President, non-profit Director, Advanced Research Program Manager, and retired Lieutenant Colonel with an unprecedented number (five) of command tours spanning nuclear weapons delivery, special operations, and hostage rescue at the company grade level. He is a world renown figure in the field of robot-assisted emergency response for his efforts in developing and deploying an assortment of portable unmanned systems to New York’s City’s World Trade Center (WTC) as the founding director of CRASAR (Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue) on September 11 2001. Upon official retirement from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a Program Manager, Colonel Blitch took over a troubled robotics division as a corporate Vice President for Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). As his revived division was enjoying a rebirth and gearing up for a number of new innovative research initiatives, John received a direct, by- name request from the Department of Defense to support a very sensitive and urgent mission with unmanned systems technology he had developed at DARPA. He took a leave of absence from SAIC to lead the world’s first deployment of semi-autonomous tactical mobile robots in modern warfare to Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). Upon his return from Afghanistan, Colonel Blitch left government service a second time to capitalize on his unique and hard-won combat zone experience by establishing a small consulting firm, Blitz Solutions Incorporated (BSI) serving as its President and CEO for six years. The innovative “niche” aspects of its business plan allowed BSI to rapidly build up a diverse set of commercial and government clients including Oceaneering International, British Petroleum (BP), Fugro N.V., the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Department of Defense (DoD). Shortly after standing up BSI,John also established his second non-profit emergency response organization, the Alliance for Robot-Assisted Crisis Assessment and Response (ARACAR). He served concurrently as its director until a devastating injury forced him to shut down both organizations and return to graduate school for a second master’s degree and PhD in cognitive psychology. By that time, however, John had already established himself as a skilled commercial operator and risk management professional while personally leading over thirty Robot-Assisted Crisis Assessment Team (RACART) field deployments behind the scenes of some of the most daunting crises facing North America. His capacity for complex organizational adaptation, risk-intensive negotiation, and innovative technology development allowed both his corporate and non-profit organizations to enjoy a surprisingly high return on investment in remote operations while conducting a number of “World’s First” humanitarian response activities on a pro-bono basis. After finally recovering from a sequence of intermittently unsuccessful surgical procedures to save his leg, Dr. Blitch re-invented himself as a cognitive scientist focused on the other (human) side of the rescue robot equation. While serving as a government sponsored SMART (Science Math and Research for Transformation) scholar and senior scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) his neurophysiological experiments took him from data collection on majestic Himalayan peaks above Mount Everest Base Camp to the bottom of glacial lakes in Canada and undersea laboratories off the Florida Keys with NASA. His research participants included a wide variety of highly skilled military personnel, UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) and ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) operators, as well as professional photographers, exobiologists, and planetary scientists. Over the past 40 years John has created, managed, and led a diverse portfolio of risk-intensive technology development initiatives spanning special operations, emergency response, and space exploration. His penchant for innovative research, selfless service, and reciprocal collaboration between diverse organizations resulted in his being inducted into the Space Technology Hall of Fame in 2006. He has been featured a number of science documentaries and media broadcasts and has served as a consultant for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), NASA, NIST, DHS, the DoD, and a number of other government agencies throughout the intelligence community and humanitarian assistance realm. He is a popular keynote speaker at emergency response conferences throughout the U.S. and remains active in research focused on technology-assisted trauma recovery and unmanned system ethics.