Chad Ohlandt, Ph.D.
Chad Ohlandt (he/his) is a senior engineer at the RAND Corporation, focusing on defense acquisition, technology policy, and Indo-Pacific issues. His work revolves around the development of requirements and acquisition of advanced aerospace systems to meet civilian, commercial, and national security needs. He also studies foreign aerospace industrial policy and programs including competition, cooperation, and global supply chains with an emphasis on Asia and China.
Ohlandt has served as a senior acquisition analyst in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense (Acquisition, Technology, & Logistics) providing analysis on the performance of the defense acquisition system from 2011-2013. He worked in Beijing at the Chinese Academy of Sciences with the NSF East Asia Summer Institute in the summer of 2004 and was a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan in 1999-2000. He has expertise in computational fluid dynamics, supercomputing, plasma physics, nuclear fusion, hypersonics, and space propulsion.
He has a B.S. in astronautics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a M.S. aerospace engineering from Pennsylvania State University, and a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and scientific computing from the University of Michigan.