Leadership / About Us
Elizabeth Burch, President/CEO
Ms. Elizabeth Burch is President/CEO and majority owner of Dignitas Technologies. Elizabeth has 20 years of experience. She began her career in software engineering and then became the manger of numerous complex simulation systems. Prior to Dignitas Technologies, Elizabeth held the position of Senior Program Manager and Assistant Vice President of Program Management at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in Orlando, FL for 16 years.
Her specialization is in modeling, simulation and training for research, development and production type contracts. She held the position of CCTT PM, OneSAF Deputy PM, SE Core A&I PM and Deep Green PM. Elizabeth’s education includes a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida (UCF), management courses from George Washington University and the Defense Management Acquisition and numerous certificate courses in the field of Program Management. Elizabeth is a member of the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) of the Sunshine Chapter, Orlando FL, National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), Program Management Institute (PMI) and the Central Florida Chapter Women in Defense (WID) as the Director of Special Projects.
Jon Watkins, Vice President/ CTO
Mr. Jon Watkins is the founder, co-owner, and Vice President/CTO of Dignitas Technologies. Mr. Watkins has been in the modeling and simulation industry since 1990. He started his M&S experience by deciphering the SIMNET TDB format for a PC-based research CGF. While he has worked in many disciplines within M&S, he has a particular interest in computer generated forces (CGF) applications, virtual simulation, terrain reasoning, and terrain databases.
Mr. Watkins has either directly participated in, or has had some influence on, many of the major Army CGF terrain formats since SIMNET TDB, including CCTT’s original run-time terrain database formats (e.g. MrTDB), WARSIM’s database format, OneSAF’s OTF, and ModSAF/OTB’s CTDB. Prior to his forming Dignitas Technologies he was the development lead of the CCTT terrain team starting in 1993 and has continued to support CCTT in various capacities since then, including recent activities to add new features (dunes, insurgent buildings) and to replace the original SNE implementation with OneSAF’s ERC. As part of SE Core A&I, he helped to integrate OneSAF into CCTT and AVCATT. As part of this work, he helped drive many of the recent changes in the OneSAF Terrain Format (OTF) as needed to support virtual applications.
In addition to his extensive Synthetic Natural Environments experience, Mr. Watkins has a broad Computer Generated Forces experience base, having touched most aspects of CGFs over the last two decades. As an example area of focus within CGFs, Mr. Watkins was one of the key developers of CCTT SAF’s movement control and path planning algorithms. Besides CCTT, he has played a role in many programs, including proposals, software development, technical leadership, and as-needed support.
Mr. Watkins has authored, co-authored, and/or reviewed many white papers, technical reports, proposals, etc., and has authored or co-authored 10 conference papers
Bob Burch, Director of Technology
Bob Burch has 29 years of development experience in the modeling and simulation industry working in both the virtual and constructive domains. Mr. Burch has a wide range of simulation experience, ranging from simple maintenance trainers, to aircraft cockpit simulators, to large complex constructive systems. Mr. Burch is the Director of Technology at Dignitas Technologies. Previously at SAIC, he was the Chief Engineer for the Orlando M&S operation, a 250 person organization working live, constructive, and virtual simulation.
His virtual simulation experience focused on virtual system architectures, executive scheduling systems, concurrent systems, simulation time management, hard real-time performance and monitoring, computational resource utilization, modeling frameworks, and I/O systems. His constructive experience has been technology leadership positions of the Army’s two largest Computer Generated Forces systems: CCTT SAF and OneSAF. Mr. Burch was the Chief Scientist for the Close Combat Tactics Trainer (CCTT) Semi-Automated Forces (SAF). He was the Software Architect for OneSAF as well as Architecture Modeler and eventually System Architect providing key guidance and proactive simulation performance modeling for the OneSAF program. He has practical experience with Product Line Architecture development for OneSAF, SE Core, and the United Kingdom’s Combined Arms Tactics Trainer (UK CATT) programs.
Greg Dukstein, Director of Engineering
Mr. Greg Dukstein brings more than 25 years of professional leadership and technical development on complex real time and simulation systems. He has worked on virtual and constructive simulation systems with a focus on Semi-Automated Forces (SAF), Synthetic Natural Environments, Dynamic Environments, and SAF database development.
He has over 10 years of technical leadership experience at all levels, from small software development teams to the chief engineer of a major simulation program. As technical lead he has experience in project planning, estimation, managing project plans and timelines, and working with customers on requirements definition and project execution.
His education includes a Bachelors of Science Electrical Engineering from Kansas University and several management and technical certificate courses.
Marlo Verdesca, Director of Programs
Ms. Marlo Verdesca brings more than 15 years of professional leadership and technical development on complex real time and simulation systems. She has over 6 years of program management experience with knowledge of management principles and practices that required leadership, accountability, and mutual cooperation. She has been part of the winning team on numerous proposals. She’s effectively managed small-large scale simulation programs for the US Army in the virtual and constructive domains. She successfully supervised geographically dispersed subcontractors for large research and development program for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). She has a strong process understanding and execution experience with CMMI level 5 and ISO 9001.
Marlo has held the position of OneSAF Deputy PM, SE Core A&I Deputy PM and Deep Green Deputy PM. Marlo’s education includes a Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems from the University of Central Florida (UCF), numerous management certificate courses in the field of Program Management. Marlo is a member of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), Program Management Institute (PMI) and the Central Florida Chapter Women in Defense (WID).