Laura McNamara has spent the past 18 years in the Department of Energy’s national laboratory system as an anthropologist working in contextual design and evaluation for national security technology systems. She wrote her dissertation about knowledge loss in the post-Cold War nuclear weapons programs at Los Alamos, then spent a couple of happy years as a staff member at LANL’s Statistical Sciences group before accepting a position at Sandia National Laboratories in 2003. These days, most of her work deals with the design and evaluation of human-information interaction systems across a wide range of domains, from cybersecurity forensics to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) operational interfaces. At Sandia, she gets to work in a wide range of technical areas, from software design and evaluation, visual cognition and human-information interaction; mostly within Sandia’s Airborne Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) research community. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of New Mexico.
Laura McNamara
