Douglas C. Schmidt is the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation for the United States Department of Defense. He is on leave from Vanderbilt University (where he is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Computer Science) and from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (where he is a Visiting Scientist and former Chief Technology Officer).

Schmidt’s research over the past four decades covers a range of software-related topics, including patterns, optimization techniques, and quality assurance of middleware frameworks and model-driven engineering tools for cyber-physical systems and mobile cloud computing applications. His recent research focuses on prompt engineering patterns that enhance the accuracy and expressiveness of large language models and generative augmented intelligence platforms.

Schmidt has published 700+ technical papers and books that have been cited 47,500+ times, his h-index is 93, and he has mentored and graduated over 40 Ph.D. and master’s students. He received an M.S. and a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Irvine.