Will Zortman
Digital Assurance for High Consequence Systems (DAHCS) Campaign Manage, Sandia National Laboratories’ Laboratory Directed Research and Development Office
Lightning Talk: “Digital Assurance for High Consequence Systems”
Bio:
Will Zortman is the Digital Assurance for High Consequence Systems (DAHCS) Campaign Manager for Sandia National Laboratories’ Laboratory Directed Research and Development Office. The DAHCS Mission Campaign is fundamental and developmental research focused on integrating digital assurance into the discipline of systems engineering enabling systems engineers, program managers and risk acceptors to make engineering trade-offs between digital risk and other system risks.
He began his career as an Air Force Combat Weather Officer leading a detachment at the Army’s First Special Forces Group (Airborne) and a special operations weather team at the Air Force’s 16th Special Operations Wing. Upon leaving the military Will led a security contracting activity providing tactical training to intelligence agencies.
Will moved into the semiconductor industry as a product change engineer at Lam Research Corporation where he was responsible for integrating design changes on etch and chemical mechanical planarization tools. He transitioned to manufacturing and later a failure analysis engineer at Intel Corporation where he pioneered AutoTracer, an automated defect response tool. Will left Intel to consult on the semiconductor industry for various hedge funds.
His career at Sandia began with integrated photonics designing state of the art photonics for focal plane array communications, high performance computing interconnect and spread spectrum technologies. Will applied his background in failure analysis and optics to supply chain assessments for the Air Force, Sandia’s anti-tamper program and nuclear weapon cyber integration. During that time, he authored guides for the acquisition of security devices.
An author on 14 licensed patents and more than 50 peer reviewed publications, Will has served on multiple IEEE committees, is a program co-chair for the Physical Assurance and Inspection of Electronics (PAINE) for 2025. He has a Bachelors in Atmospheric Science from the University of Arizona and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Mexico.
Will volunteers as a Wilderness Emergency Medical Technician (W-EMT) on Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council (AMRC).