Laura McNamara
Principal Member of Technical Staff
Contact Information:
lamcnam@sandia.govP. O. Box 5800
Albuquerque, NM 87185-0370
(505) 844-1366
(505) 284-0154 fax
Experience
Dr. Laura A. McNamara is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She works in the Exploratory Simulation Technologies Department (01433) as part of an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists who study issues of modeling and simulation, verification and validation, uncertainty quantification, and decision making.
McNamara received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 2001, with a dissertation on the problem of knowledge loss in the post-Cold War nuclear weapons programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). After completing her doctorate, she spent three years as a staff member in LANL's Statistical Sciences Group before moving to Sandia in 2004.
As an organizational anthropologist, McNamara conducts field studies with groups that are attempting to develop and/or integrate modeling and simulation tools into their work processes. She has worked with the Missile Defense Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the nuclear weapons programs at Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories to identify both the limitations of, and leverage points for, the effective use of modeling and simulation technologies in interdisciplinary research and development projects. Her research interests include expert knowledge elicitation, knowledge representation, distributed cognition, collaboration, uncertainty quantification, and verification and validation for social and behavioral modeling and simulation technologies. In addition, Dr. McNamara is a member of Sandia's Human Studies Board.
McNamara lives on five acres in east central New Mexico with her husband, Paul Johnson, four German shepherds, and four llamas.
Professional Information
Updated: 9/18/2007