Dr. David J. Gorsich was selected for a Scientific and Professional (ST) position in January 2009 and serves as the Army’s Chief Scientist for Ground Vehicle Systems. His current research interests are vehicle design and mobility, system reliability, underbody blast modeling, terrain modeling, gaming engines and autonomy.

Prior to his current position, Gorsich served as the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center’s (TARDEC’s) Associate Director for Modeling and Simulation (M&S), from July 2003 to December 2008. He has served as the Director for Strategic Plans and Programs (G5), and the Team Leader for Robotics and Vehicle Intelligence. He also served in various other assignments at TARDEC, the Army Materiel Command, the Army Research Laboratory and for the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisitions, Logistics and Technology). Before Federal Service, Gorsich was an electrical engineer with McGraw Commercial Equipment Corporation.

Gorsich was named Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in 2020 and became Fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) in 2008. He has served on the SAE Technical Standards Board for a 3-year term, been the chair for the SAE International Standards Committee for Ground Vehicle Reliability and also on the SAE Board of Directors. He has received several Commander’s Coins, including from: the 30^th Undersecretary of the Army Hon Westphal; the Army Chief Scientist Dr. Tom Killion; the Army Central Command GEN John Abizad; the Army Chief of Staff, GEN Peter Schoomaker, 2005; West Virginia National Guard, 2004; the Army TACOM MG William M. Lenaers; 2004; the TACOM MG N. Ross Thompson, 2003. Gorsich has received other numerous awards including the ASME 2020 Milliken Award, the SAE 2016 Arch T. Colwell Merit Award, the 2001 Detroit Federal Executive Board Award and the 1997 Army Research, Development and Acquisition Award, “Innovations in Ground Vehicle Signature Research.”

Dr. Gorsich is recognized in many professional organizations for his research accomplishments. Gorsich serves as an Editor-in-Chief for the International Journal of Terramechanics, Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Autonomous Vehicle Systems, the Editorial Board of the International Journal for Reliability and Safety, and as past Associate Editor for the Journal of Mechanical Design, 2009-2015. He is a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Chapter of Sigma Xi, and the Senior Executives Association, ST Chapter.  Gorsich also serves as the U.S. Army representative on the NATO Science & Technology Applied Vehicle Technology panel.  He also serves as an external advisor to the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering, Clemson University’s international Center for Automotive Research, and to Sandia National Labs.

Dr. Gorsich has published more than 200 journal and conference articles including more than 60 peer reviewed journal articles. He has published in the following peer reviewed journals: Transactions of SAE; International Journal of Vehicle Design; Journal of Mechanical Design; Journal of Commercial Vehicles; Contemporary Mathematics; Computational Statistics and Data Analysis; Physical Review D; Society of Automotive Engineers; Journal of Multivariate Analysis; Journal of Electronic Imaging; Optical Engineering; Pattern Recognition Letters; Statistics and Computing; Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

Gorsich holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from Lawrence Technological University. He holds an M.S. in applied mathematics from George Washington University and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from MIT with a focus on AI, autonomy, and spatial statistics.