Dr. Gieson has the goal of using host-based methods to mitigate the impacts of emerging threats. He explores epigenetic and real-time monitoring approaches that can dynamically guide healthcare decisions and therapy as well as new methods of increasing patient survival in austere environments using intelligent systems partnered with local care providers. Prior to joining DARPA, Dr. Van Gieson served as the Chief Technology Officer at the National Strategic Research Institute and before that as Director of Biosurveillance and Diagnostics at MRIGlobal. He has also served as Chief of the Diagnostics, Disease Surveillance, and Threat Detection Division within the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and as Principal Professional Staff at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Dr. Van Gieson has served as the Chief Judge on the Nokia Sensing XChallenge and a Judge on the QualComm Tricorder XChallenge on behalf of the XPrize Foundation. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Biomedical Engineering and a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Virginia. He has published on topics ranging from genomic analysis to autonomous systems.