George Backus
Principal Member of Technical Staff
Contact Information:
gabacku@sandia.govP. O. Box 5800
Albuquerque, NM 87185-0370
(505) 284-5787
(505) 284-0154 fax
Experience
George Backus has a BS and MS in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, completed graduate work in socioeconomic systems at UCSD, has a MS in Policy Design and System Simulation from Dartmouth College (a combined program of the Tuck School of Business and Thayer School of Engineering), and a D.Engr. in System Dynamics and Operations Research from Dartmouth College. He is currently a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, developing agent-based analyses of human behavioral and macroeconomic dynamics under extreme and disequilibrium conditions. His work focuses on the consequence of climate change as it relates to macroeconomic threats and potential military conflict at both a local and international level. His research includes methods to extend verification and validation techniques to encompass agent (micro), meso, and macro-level socio-economic analyses.
Before joining SNL, he spent 20 years as the president and CEO of Policy Assessment Corporation (PAC) directing policy assessments for corporate and government clients primarily in the areas of energy markets, macroeconomic impacts, financial risk, infrastructure constraints, the environment, and climate change, using multi-agent and complex, adaptive system approaches. His last efforts included Central/Eastern European and South American energy planning for utilities, Canadian/US environmental policy assessment, as well as, high-tech market and product development assessment for several multinational corporations. He was the Chief Technical Advisor working for the Office of the Prime Minister to support the Canadian Kyoto Ratification. He has also provided testimony to the US Congress on both electricity and oil/gas energy-market policy.
He took a sabbatical during 1994-1995 to be the Director of Energy and Environmental Research at Cambridge Econometrics Ltd. (UK) and a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Applied Economics, Cambridge University. Under contract to the European Commission, he supported the development of the European Union's macroeconomic policy models and he investigated alternative theories of economic growth and R&D as they relate to western and eastern European developmental strategies.
Before founding PAC, George was the manager of the Advanced Modeling/Simulation Group at the, Control Data Corporation. He was responsible for commercializing the simulation research advancements from Dartmouth College and Purdue University. He was the principal investigator for projects producing a macroeconomic-development model of Brazil, steel-industry redevelopment in the US, energy-industry strategic analysis, technology-innovation and market dynamics, and model confidence/uncertainty analysis software. He developed the ENERGY 2020 model still used world-wide by industries and governments for energy and environmental planning and policy. He was also an assistant professor at Purdue University in the School of Industrial Engineering. There, his DOE sponsored research examined the effect of energy policy on the economy and improved methods of end-use demand simulation. His industry-funded research focused on economic productivity, synthetic fuel development, international trade with foreign resource dependence, modeling of socio-psychological behaviors and decision responses, terrorism policy, crime amelioration, and hazardous waste policy.
Prior to that, he was the Director of the DOE National Energy Policy Program at Dartmouth College. He directed analytical studies to determine the effects of national and international energy policies, predict behavior of world oil markets, simulate all-fuel energy supply and demand responses, and develop software for rapid analysis and documentation of policies for the DOE Office of Policy Planning and Evaluation. Results were used to develop National Energy Plans II through IV, the National Energy Policy Plan (1990), and the National Energy Strategy (1992). He was the Head Analyst for the National Energy Plan II Task Force under President Carter. As part of that function, he coordinated with other government offices on proposed energy policy, prepared Congressional testimony, and gave briefings on National Energy Plan I for the US House Subcommittee on Energy and Power. He co-authored the FOSSIL (IDEAS) series of National Energy Policy computer models used by DOE for all long-term policy analysis between 1978 and 1998.
In his earlier career, he was a Research Engineer in the Advanced Concepts Division, GA Technologies (A Sohio and Royal-Dutch Shell Partnership) performing system/safety/economic/environmental analyses of synthetic fuel facilities; and solar, fusion, and advanced fission (HTGR) power plants. He was responsible for nuclear systems, safety, environmental impacts, nuclear security, and licensing; and was a member of US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Criticality and Nuclear Safety (Security) Committee. While at the University of Wisconsin, he performed research for the Aerojet Corporation on methods for the analysis and detection of nuclear reactor approach to safety limits, and he refined advanced software for nuclear-core failure-analysis. He was also a Project Engineer at the Northern States Power Company (now XCEL Energy) where he coordinated and monitored modification of nuclear safety systems at the Monticello and Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Stations. Further, he was a Design Engineer working with the National Electrostatics Corporation and University of Wisconsin, where he installed and designed control systems/centers for nuclear accelerator laboratory facilities after an anti-war radical blew-up the Sterling Hall Nuclear Accelerator. He helped design some of the first intelligent nuclear-physics experiment-detection and monitoring instrumentation using the then novel innovation of integrated circuits.
Updated: 7/20/2007