Wayne Austad

Chief Technology Officer, Acting Chief Science Officer, National & Homeland Security

Idaho National Laboratory

Wayne Austad has worked at INL for 31 years with more than 22 years of experience building impactful national security programs. As CTO for National & Homeland Security he provides leadership and strategy for the collaborative R&D, infrastructure, and partnerships needed for critical programs, acts as Chief R&D Officer for CyManII, a DOE institute led by UTSA focused on economically viable and pervasive cybersecurity in automation and supply chain, and leads the Secure & Resilient Cyber Physical Systems Initiative for the Laboratory. Previously as a Program Office Director, Austad led efforts to build the Cybercore Integration Center and create a collaborative, interdisciplinary teaming environment between federal agencies, national labs, and academic institutions. Austad is the founding Chair of the Cyber Partnership for Advancing Resilient Control Systems (CyberPARC), a formal, self-organized collaboration between INL, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories. Austad was the founding program manager for communications R&D at INL, coordinating multi-customer efforts to create the industry-scale Wireless Test Bed to evaluate interoperability, performance, and security of new technologies within INL’s Critical Infrastructure Test Range Complex. After brief jobs with Conoco and DOE-Idaho, Austad started his INL career in Artificial Intelligence & Simulation, working on hybrid neural network / expert systems, machine health monitoring, and 3D simulation environments for real-time robotic control. Austad earned a MSEE and BSEE from the University of Wyoming with focus areas of Digital Signal Processing and Computer Engineering.