Douglas Craig Schmidt Becomes Defense Department's Director of Operational Test and Evaluation

Schmidt is the latest Defense Department official to receive Senate approval this week.

The U.S. Senate today held a recorded vote to confirm one individual nominated by President Joe Biden to serve in the executive branch of government - specifically in the Department of Defense led by Secretary Lloyd Austin since January 2021.

By voice vote, Douglas Craig Schmidt was confirmed as Director of Operational Test and Evaluation. This position has been led by an acting official since December 2023, when Nickolas Guertin resigned to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition.

Schmidt was nominated to this position by Biden in November 2023. For the last three decades, he has led the development of middleware frameworks used in thousands of distributed real-time and embedded systems across many domains, including national defense and homeland security, datacom/telecom, financial services, and healthcare.

Schmidt served as Chief Technology Officer for Prism Technologies from 2006 to 2009 and then for Zircon Computing from 2009 to 2010. From 2010 to 2012, he served as the Deputy Director of Research at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University in 2018 and currently serves as a professor of computer science. Notably, he co-founded the university’s Data Science Institute.