Schmidt Succeeds Wilson as LAS Principal Investigator

The Laboratory for Analytic Sciences has a new principal investigator, but he’s not new to LAS. 

Matthew Schmidt is taking over the duties previously handled by Alyson Wilson, who was recently promoted to interim vice chancellor for research at NC State University after the retirement of Mladen Vouk. Wilson was the principal investigator at LAS for ten years.

Schmidt joined LAS in 2014 as an analytic solutions manager and has served as the director of programs since 2018. As director of programs, Schmidt oversaw the technical portfolio of LAS’s projects with academic and industry collaborators. 

“We’ve sown a lot of seeds over the last 10 years,” says Schmidt. “It’s exciting to see what has caught on, and what projects are having an impact.” 

He’s referring to things like student engagement, senior design projects, the research symposium, and the development of the annual Summer Conference on Applied Data Science, which is now in its third year. “I look forward to building on these successes.”  

At research universities like NC State, a principal investigator is the individual designated by the university and approved by the sponsor of a contract or grant who is responsible for the project’s scientific or technical direction. At LAS, the PI is responsible not just for the work NC State does, but also for the work being done by all of its industry and academic collaborators. As PI, Schmidt will work closely with the lab’s director, Jacqueline Selig-Gumtow, to provide leadership and strategic direction for the lab’s research and programs.

Before joining LAS, Schmidt spent four years at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Defense federally funded research and development center established to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. As a technical staff member in the computing and analytics group, he led and participated in applied research projects on the theoretical bounds of anomaly detection in graphs, geospatial event detection in text-based media, and analytic development environments for open-source data. Schmidt received his Ph.D. from NC State in 2011 for his research on developing and scaling algorithms for enumerating common graph motifs in biological networks. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science from Purdue University.

LAS is a partnership between NC State and the National Security Agency. It facilitates collaboration between industry, academia and government and is housed in the Office of Research and Innovation on NC State’s Centennial Campus. 

Schmidt says he appreciates seeing how a partnership like LAS can have results with impact.

“We’re always looking for projects that are in the mutual interest of both our sponsor and our collaborators,” says Schmidt. “Where does that overlap exist? What are the next cool and interesting things that could lead to fascinating capabilities?”