Gaming Weapons of Mass Destruction - From Policy to Practice

Dr. Ruby E. Booth is a principal member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories, where she serves as a cybersecurity analyst and national security subject matter expert. She specializes in the interaction between human behavior and cybersecurity.

She received her undergraduate degree from Rhodes College and an MS and PhD from the University of Memphis. She is a nonresident fellow of the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab and the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity at the University of California, Berkeley.

Before starting her work in the national security field, she spent over a decade working and writing in the hobby games industry.

Dr. Christine Hughes has worked at the Center for Naval Analyses since 2002 and is presently a Principal Research Scientist. She received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Duke University, and was a National Institute of Health postdoctoral fellow at the Cellular Biophysics and Biochemistry Program at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

She interviewed at CNA on 9/11 and this influenced her decision to leave academia to support the Navy and DOD. Dr. Hughes has worked in several areas including chemical and biological weapon defense analysis and wargaming, biometric and forensic exploitation, sensitive site exploitation, weapons technical intelligence, identity management, and information operations.

She supported the Naval Criminal Investigative Service as a counterterrorism intelligence analyst at the FBI National Joint Terrorism Task Force from 2006 to 2009. She has worked on several Congressionally-mandated studies dealing with research, development, testing and evaluation within DOD and on a recent Capabilities Based Assessment for chem bio gaps in the US Forces Korea area of responsibility for the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense - Chemical and Biological Defense.

Dr. Roger Mason retired after 29 years of public safety experience in Los Angeles County. For the past fifteen years he has specialized in emergency management and the development of wargames and exercises.

He has designed over 50 emergency management and public safety wargames and hybrid game/functional exercises. His clients include National Defense University, Penn State University, the University of Hawaii, the US Army, and the CNA Corporation. Dr. Mason has served as the wargaming professor for the Institute for Intelligence Analysis, Juan Carlos University, Madrid Spain.

Mason is a published author on the topic of wargames. He is the co-founder of LECMgt, a strategic management firm based in Camarillo, California. He holds a Ph. D in Management and Decision sciences from Walden University and an M.A. in Public Administration from the California State University, Northridge. He retired after 37 years of service with the Air National Guard/ USAF Reserve.

Dr. McGrady writes, speaks, and teaches on the design of professional games. He is an adjunct senior fellow in gaming at CNAS, teaches and manages game design courses for MORS/Virginia Tech, and runs a business devoted to using games and game techniques to bring innovative experiences in new areas. His recent book, Roll to Save: Gaming Disease Response, describes designing games in support of public health professionals.

In the past Dr. McGrady built and directed a team of 10-20 analysts at CNA devoted to the design and execution of professional games. Dr. McGrady has written, taught, and presented on the topic of games and their use in organizational and individual learning. He has designed and run games for many different clients ranging from the White House to the Department of Agriculture to the automotive industry. Dr. McGrady has also built a team at CNA devoted to chemical and biological response operations, including domestic response operations.

Dr. McGrady has deployed as an analyst with US Forces in Haiti during operation Uphold Democracy, onboard USS Nimitz for Desert Storm and with operational E-2C squadrons. Dr. McGrady holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan. He has published extensively in the Chemical Engineering, physics, and national security literature and is widely cited for his work on the mathematics of aggregation and fragmentation.