William “Bill” Whitledge has more than 15 years of
experience working on the research staff at the Institute for Defense Analyses
(IDA) on Department of War (DoW) and Homeland Security (DHS) projects. His
research and analyses have supported developmental and operational testing of
DoW and DHS business, cybersecurity, and communications systems, including
conducting in-depth analyses of reliability, cybersecurity, and human factors.
From 2020 to 2025, Bill led a multidisciplinary IDA research
group serving as the Independent Test Agent (ITA) for DHS software and
cybersecurity acquisition programs, including coordinating “Red Team” security
assessments for these programs.
In 2026, Bill began supporting the Director, Systems
Engineering Modernization (SE MOD) within Systems Engineering and Architecture
(SE&A), leading a team of IDA researchers to develop methodologies and
tools to assess how DoW acquisition programs are implementing a Modular Open
Systems Approach (MOSA) in their systems. The goal of this research is to
develop more repeatable, comprehensive, and usable methods to assess and track
MOSA implementation and compliance over time and across DoW acquisition.
At IDA, Bill has developed several web-based interactive and
quantitative analysis applications on topics such as reliability, logistic
regression, and survey analysis. (Published on the IDA-operated Test Science
website: https://testscience.org/).
Bill’s academic background is in electrical engineering (MS, Stanford
University, 2010) and physics (BA, Colby College, 2008). He enjoys mountain
biking, hiking, and golfing in his free time.