SUFFOLK, Va. – (June 26, 2025) – After an extensive search, the ODU Office of Enterprise Research and Innovation (OERI) is excited to announce the appointment of B. Danette Allen, Ph.D., as Executive Director of the Virginia Modeling, Analysis, & Simulation Center (VMASC).Dr. Allen is the first female Executive Director of VMASC.

“We’re delighted to welcome Dr. Danette Allen to the team as VMASC’s Executive Director. Her visionary leadership and industry insight bring an exciting new chapter to VMASC, ODU’s longstanding center of excellence in modeling, simulation, and analysis,” said Dr. Eric Weisel, Senior Associate Vice President for Applied Research. “I’m confident Dr. Allen’s strategic guidance will amplify the impact of our research and foster innovative collaborations across all our centers.”

With a 30-year extensive experience working for NASA, Dr. Allen is a pioneering senior leader in autonomous systems, having managed the agency’s strategic direction in autonomy to meet current and future mission needs across aeronautics, space, robotics, and human exploration.

Dr. Allen has held numerous leadership roles including being the founder and lead of the Autonomy Incubator at NASA LaRC, Chief Technologist at the Virginia Institute for Spaceflight and Autonomy (VISA), where she authored the Hampton Roads Eastern Shore Autonomous Systems Strategic Playbook, and PI for ATTRACTOR (Autonomy Teaming & TRAjectories for Complex Trusted Operational Reliability), where Dr. Allen led a team of researchers and engineers at multiple NASA centers seeking to understand and measure trust and trustworthiness of autonomous systems.

Her work spans groundbreaking R&D, inter-agency collaboration, academic mentorship, and strategic planning, shaping the future of autonomous operations both within NASA and across the broader aerospace and defense landscape. Additionally, Dr. Allen regularly engages as a subject matter expert in the AI and Digital Twin communities.

Throughout her career, Dr. Allen has been responsible for technical excellence, partnerships with other government agencies, industry, and academia, socialization and outreach, workforce development, programmatic development and oversight, through all of which runs a critical thread of modeling and simulation.

With Dr. Allen’s experience and leadership, OERI is confident that she will be able to elevate VMASC’s role as a leader in modeling, analysis, and simulation – driving transformative solutions for complex challenges across government, industry, and academia.

About the Office of Enterprise Research and Innovation: OERI is ODU’s largest division of research. OERI unifies and focuses the advanced research of six distinct and diverse multidisciplinary applied research centers. OERI manages a robust portfolio of contracts and leads ODU’s engagement in several formal partnerships, which provides ODU faculty a pathway to collaborate with researchers at other universities and federal agency sponsors.