Azad Madni is a researcher, entrepreneur, educator and author. He is the founder and CEO of Intelligent Systems Technology, Inc. a high tech company specializing in modeling and simulation technology for complex systems engineering, education and training. He's the Executive Director of University of Southern California's Systems Architecting and Engineering (SAE) Program and Professor of Astronautical Engineering in USC's Viterbi School of Engineering. His previous positions include Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Perceptronics, and Simulation Research Leader at Rockwell International on NASA's Space Shuttle Program.

        He pioneered the meta-discipline of transdisciplinary systems engineering to exploit the convergence of systems engineering with other disciplines. He is the creator of model-driven storytelling, a transdiscplinary approach that integrates model-based engineering with interactive storytelling in virtual worlds to enhance stakeholder participation in upfront engineering. His areas of expertise include model-based methods for architecting and design of resilient systems and enterprizes and intelligent systems for planning, decision making, training and tutoring. His research in these areas has been sponsored by the federal government, aerospace and automotive companies, several DOD agencies, Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps. His research sponsors in the government include DARPA, OSD, DHS, S&T, MDA, DOE, NIST and NASA. His research sponsors in the aerospace and automotive industries include Boeing, General Motors, NGC, Raytheon, Hughes, Omnicon and SAIC. He has served as a consultant to Institute for Defense Analysis, RAND Corporation, UCLA, Oakridge National Laboratory, and Omnicon.

        Azad Madni's current research focuses on formal and probabilistic methods for complex systems engineering, model-based engineering frameworks and testbeds for defining, analyzing, integrating and testing of adaptive cyber-physical-human-systems, and system-of-systems and enterprize architecting.

        He is the co-founder and current chair of IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Model-Based Systems Engineering Technical Committee, and serves on the steering committees of multiple centers at USC.

He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.