ARA's Board of Directors has announced the promotion of David Oakley to Senior Vice President. David is Manager of the Systems and Operations Sector, which includes the Shock Physics Division in Albuquerque, NM; the Southeast Division in Raleigh, NC; and the Capital Area Division in Alexandria, VA. Under David's leadership, the Sector experienced 16.5 percent growth in fiscal year 2004 and 34 percent growth in fiscal year 2005 with over $41 million in revenue.

David has 20 years of experience, including 12 years at ARA , in the areas of structural analysis, probabilistic mechanics, numerical methods and software development. He joined SED in 1994 as lead engineer on a reliability-based optimization project for NASA Lewis, developing new computationally efficient algorithms and methods for implementing these on parallel computers. From 1996 to 1998, his research was primarily focused on managing development of the Munitions Effects Assessment (MEA) Tunnels module for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. In 1998, David volunteered to move to ARA's Washington D.C. office for two years to manage planning tool development for DTRA's Hard Target Defeat Systems Engineering and Integration effort. When he returned to SED in 2000, he was promoted to Group Leader of the Advanced Modeling and Software Systems Group and then to Manager of the Southeast Division in 2001. In 2003, he was promoted to Vice President and to Sector Manager.

Prior to joining ARA, David worked at Michelin for more than seven years, where he developed data acquisition and analysis program for measuring tire noise, vibration, and temperature during dynamic testing. David holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Engineering Mechanics from Clemson University, and he is a registered professional engineer in North Carolina.