Carol Jacoby

Carol Jacoby, PhD, specializes in analytical techniques for data science, system effectiveness prediction, systems engineering and decision analysis. She has 28 years of experience in systems engineering at Hughes Electronics and Rockwell International. She led Hughes' Mission Analysis Center of Excellence in developing, simulating, and analyzing complex systems of systems for defense, transportation, and other areas. She was one of the first people to apply systems engineering and analytical techniques to highway transportation, including early work on driverless vehicles. She has taught these techniques since 2001 to government agencies and major corporations. She is the author of the book Simple Spreadsheets for Hard Decisions, which brings many of these decision techniques to a general audience. She also co-authored the Systems Engineering Guidebook for the Federal Highway Administration. Dr. Jacoby has been honored through the District One Toastmasters’ elite Speakers Bureau, multiple Hughes and Raytheon Achievement Awards, the Hughes Doctoral Fellowship, and Phi Beta Kappa. Dr. Jacoby is an internationally recognized research mathematician, with several recent publications in peer-reviewed journals and a new book written for advanced graduate students and researchers. She earned her PhD at the University of California, Irvine, her MS at Northeastern University, and her BA at UCLA, all in mathematics.