Dr. Ann Carbonell

Dr. Ann Carbonell is a senior leader with over 32 years of experience in program and project management, 13 years of the 32 as an NGA Senior Executive with responsibilities spanning infra structure acquisition, architecture and systems engineering, contract restructures, multi-billion-dollar annual budget oversight, and personnel management. These responsibilities included NGA worldwide IT systems and interfaces to NRO spacecraft and ground processing assets for intelligence integration.

Dr. Carbonell currently is a Riverside Research’s Senior Advisor to the Air Force National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC). She has developed strategic documents for MASINT and GEOINT based architecture and R&D initiatives for the Intelligence Community and Department of Defense, established a NASIC strategy for implementing AI/ML, and contributed to policy guidance for decoupling platforms from “INTs” so arbitrary stovepipes are avoided and integrated architectures can be developed in the IC. Dr. Carbonell is a member of the AFCEA Intelligence Committee.

Dr. Carbonell comes to Riverside Research from a career at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), ultimately leading the development for the Agency’s 2022 Information Technology (IT) Strategic Plan as Director of Strategic Planning for the NGA Technology Directorate. Prior to that, she served as USAF/NASIC Senior NGA Support Team Chief, where she was responsible for improving GEOINT analytic quality and timeliness and building a “Single Seal” approach to joint USAF and NGA analytic products. She developed a holistic concept for analysis making sure IT capabilities were available to the user, new GEOINT capabilities were tested and implemented, and Air Force partner capabilities were integrated into the GEOINT workflow.

Previously at NGA, Dr. Carbonell was Director of Information Integration in InnoVision (now NGA/Research). In that role, she oversaw seven research and development (R&D) labs across the United States that sustained and improved NGA-supplied infrastructure and provided developers and data scientists the tools, data, and processes they needed to address customers’ GEOINT needs.

Earlier, Dr. Carbonell served as NGA’s first Director of Open IT (OIT) Strategic Initiative Lead and the Director of NGA Expeditionary Architecture where she set the agency’s strategic vision and laid the foundation for its IT transformation – within NGA’s footprint and for operational deployments. She advised the USDI on wide area LIDAR for operational AORs and developed and implemented a program for deployment. She authored and presented a series of conference briefs on Activity-Based Analysis (ABI), Big Data and LiDAR, and advised senior DoD and IC leadership on strategies synchronizing classification guidance between Title 10 and 50 space-related activities.

Dr. Carbonell earned her BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Dayton, her MS in Math and Computer Science from Creighton University, and her Ph.D. in Information Systems from NOVA Southeastern University. She held a DAWIA Level 3 Certification in Program Management and is recipient of a Presidential Rank Award, a Counter Proliferation Team Meritorious Unit Citation, and the two Intelligence Community Science & Technology Awards, among others. She holds TS/SCI clearances with CI polygraph.