As of the first of October, Drs. Matthew Whiteley and Eric Magee have joined MZA and initiated operations in the Dayton area. Plans are to open a permanent office in the next few weeks. MZA's new office can call upon a significant pool of Dayton-area talent and has more direct access to the Wright Patterson Air Force Base system acquisition centers, AFRL Sensors Directorate, the AFIT Center for Directed Energy (CDE), and the University of Dayton Electro-Optics program.

Dr. Whiteley has been named Vice President of the Dayton office. As a Senior Research Scientist and Group Leader for Alliant Techsystems Mission Research Corporation (ATK MRC), Dr. Whiteley was very successful in building a staff of adaptive optics and atmospheric propagation experts. His group provided analysis, scaling code, and wave optics modeling to a variety of AFRL, Airborne Laser (ABL), and other directed energy projects. Prior to joining ATK MRC, he was a Captain in the USAF serving as the Principal Investigator for the AFRL Dynamic Compensation Experiment (DyCE) performed at the North Oscura Peak (NOP) facility on White Sands Missile Range (WSMR). Dr. Whiteley has a Ph.D. and M.S. in Physics from AFIT and a B.S. in Physics from Carnegie Mellon.

Dr. Magee, now a Senior Scientist at MZA, was a Senior Research Engineer at ATK MRC. He helped to devise a new phase screen generation method that allows phase screens to be extruded for arbitrary lengths. He applied that technique to help develop a liquid crystal device which simulates atmospheric turbulence in laboratory experiments. He is also a lead author of the ATMTools Matlab library which provides comprehensive geometric and Rytov calculations. Prior to ATK, Dr. Magee was a USAF Major where he was on the AFIT faculty as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering. Dr. Magee has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University, an MSEE from AFIT, and a BS in Engineering from Grove City College.