Vice Adm. Brad Cooper is the son of a career Army Officer. He is a 1989 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, and earned a master’s degree in Strategic Intelligence from the National Intelligence University. He has also studied national security policy and international relations at Harvard and Tufts Universities.

A career surface warfare officer, he served on guided missile cruisers, guided missile destroyers, aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships. His ship commands include USS Russell (DDG 59) and USS Gettysburg (CG 64). Cooper is particularly proud of the extraordinary men and women with whom he served on sea duty during nine deployments and 13 real-world operations all around the world. His amazing Sailors in USS Gettysburg earned the Battenberg Cup as the best ship, submarine or aircraft carrier in the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet.

Ashore, he served in a variety of executive, military assistant and special assistant roles in the White House, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, U.S. Africa Command and U.S. Pacific Fleet Headquarters. He also served as principal U.S. Advisor to the Interior Minister of Afghanistan and director, Surface Warfare Officer Assignments (Pers-41).

As a flag officer, he mostly recently served as commander, Naval Surface Force Atlantic. Previous tours include service as Chief of Legislative Affairs, where he lead the Navy’s engagement efforts with the U.S. Congress; commander, U.S. Naval Forces Korea during the height of tensions on the Korean Peninsula in 2016-2017; and commander, Expeditionary Strike Group 7 in Okinawa, Japan, where he lead U.S. 7th Fleet’s Navy-Marine Corps team on the U.S. military’s first F-35 deployment.

Cooper has been recognized with various personal and unit-level awards including the Distinguished Service Medal and Bronze Star Medal. He is a recipient of the Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Award for Visionary Leadership.

Andrew Burnett is the Maritime Autonomy Business Development Lead for QinetiQ. After leaving the Army, Andrew completed an MBA at the University of Edinburgh before pursuing an international business development career of over 20 years in both the commercial and defence and security sectors working in Asia, Europe and South America.

Andrew joined QinetiQ in 2018 and works with a wide range of delivery teams across the company, both in the UK and internationally. The core focus of his work is ensuring that QinetiQ’s wide expertise and experience in developing, testing and using robotic and autonomous systems (RAS) is leveraged to support customers in delivering their autonomy programmes and operationalising their RAS capability.

Gerry Kawamura has been actively engaged as a leader in the Aerospace and Communications Industry since 1979, specializing in general avionics, military communication systems, and global network connectivity, for over 40 years, he has worked in Marketing Management, Program / Project Management and Systems Engineering roles, architecting and implementing large scale avionics programs for such corporations as Lockheed Martin, Rockwell Collins, and L3Harris. He was the project leader for several major communications products and significant aircraft modifications for US Government aircraft systems such as: P-3/S3 avionics modifications, C-130, P-8 Poseidon and numerous UAV platforms. Specific technology specialties include (SDR) Software Definable Radios, Common Data Link (CDL) technologies, commonly deployed on US Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance aircraft, data link Communications and communications relay systems.

He is currently employed by L3Harris as a Senior Systems Engineer with significant engineering, program and marketing responsibilities for the middle eastern and central asian regions.

He was responsible for advanced systems communications business development, customer relations, product demonstrations, product development, program management and marketing elements within the L3Harris organization. He was extensively involved with international business and new product development strategies, both commercial and military.
During his tenure with L3Harris, Gerry’s responsibilities have included management and direction of a 170 person engineering design, development, and sustainment department. This department was responsible for all engineering expenditures to operate maintain and support all facets of a $1.3B company. He managed annual internal engineering expenditures in excess of $200 M. As a Director of Programs, his responsible included all elements of program performance for naval airborne and surface vessel data link programs. These programs included international data link programs for P-3 aircraft in Australia, U.S. P-3 and various UAV aircraft modifications, as well as shipboard and submarine SATCOM programs with Korea and Italy. As a Marketing director responsibilities included business area forecasting and sales within a business area of $200M. Negotiated contracts, Statements of Work with customers supporting double digit divisional growth of the business by an average of $100M annually.

During his tenure with Rockwell Collins his responsibilities included business area marketing within the military communications sector, primarily the ARC-210 product, leading the product growth to over $500M in sales within 3 years. Working both with Rockwell Collins and E-Systems, He led both international and domestic proposal teams to secure a $700M aircraft modification program with the Australian government for a complete avionics upgrade to the Australian P-3 fleet.

He began his career in the aerospace sector with six years active duty service with the U.S. Navy, before joining industry. He holds a degree in Professional Aeronautics from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University and an MBA from the University of Iowa.