Leadership

Dr. Dockstader leads strategy and technology innovation across a broad program portfolio, with particular emphasis on accelerating the development and adoption of commercial technology to address critical mission needs at speed and scale within the space and national security communities. He mentors and provides technical oversight to teams of engineers and subject matter experts responsible for leading R&D initiatives in the areas of space systems, artificial intelligence, autonomy, human systems, energy, cyber, and quantum sensing. He leads partner engagement across the commercial, space, AI/ML, and analytics ecosystems to architect novel and next-generation solutions to complex mission challenges and was formerly the Director of the Integrated Commercial Solutions Group at Riverside Research.

Prior to joining Riverside Research in 2023, Dr. Dockstader served as the Director of Strategic Programs at Planet Labs PBC. In this role, he provided strategic direction and technical oversight on funded R&D initiatives for informing the design and accelerating the deployment of Planet’s next-generation satellite systems and product offerings. From 1997 to 2020, he was employed in a series of engineering leadership and business development positions at L3Harris –and its legacy organizations –where he was responsible for overseeing strategy and technology development in the areas of sensor and payload design, ground and onboard processing, and advanced exploitation solutions for space-based reconnaissance systems. 

His research interests are in anticipatory and activity-based intelligence, space domain awareness, and orchestrated space-based collection and constellation design. He holds numerous patents and publications in these and related fields, including a book chapter on feature extraction for multi-sensor surveillance, an invited paper on multiple object tracking, and an award-winning paper on probabilistic motion modeling. Dr. Dockstader was the Program Chair for the 2013-2015 SPIE Defense and Security Symposium’s Geospatial Information Fusion Conferences, the Industrial Chair for both the 2012 and 2014 IEEE International Conferences on Advanced Video and Signal-Based Surveillance, and the Program Chair for the 2015 International Conference on Information Fusion. He was a finalist for Washington Exec’s 2024 Space Executive of the Year and is a top Space Executive to Watch for 2025.

He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and authored his Ph.D. dissertation in Electrical and Computer Engineering on the Video-Based Analysis of Human Motion with the University of Rochester. He is a member of IEEE, SPIE, Tau Beta Pi, and Phi Beta Kappa.