Nick Rotker
Chief BlueTech strategist, senior manager, Underwater and Acoustic Systems
Nick Rotker, MITRE’s chief BlueTech strategist, leads a work program featuring a lab with a 620,000-gallon tank to facilitate rapid undersea testing, innovation, and collaboration across government, academia, and industry. An electrical engineer, Rotker brings expertise in underwater acoustics, radar systems, signal processing algorithm development, and distributed sensing systems. He is an executive board member and chair of the New England Chapter of the Marine Technology Society. Rotker also provides connection and mentorship to early-state entrepreneurs looking to accelerate the nation’s Blue Economy.
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My name is Nick Rotker, and I am Mitre's Chief BlueTech strategist.
I lead Mitre's work portfolio in the BlueTech space, connecting industry, academia and government across the whole maritime ecosystem.
The BlueTech Work Program really encompasses a whole host of opportunities and missions across our sponsor base.
From national security implications, to climate change as well as economic security, it really touches all the different pieces of our global economy.
You can make incremental steps forward on a day-to-day basis, as well as do things that take years to come to fruition.
How do you get more data out of the ocean, right?
So how do we improve communication systems, power systems, platforms to help enable getting more information out of the oceans so that we can fully understand what's happening?
It is a really difficult environment for us to operate in.
There's no power, there's no communications, and so Mitre is really working hard across all our different backgrounds and disciplines to develop new kinds of capabilities, systems, platforms that get at trying to figure out what is going on below the surface of the water.
What I'm most excited about is the internal investment that Mire is making in this BlueTech space.
We are currently building a state-of-the-art maritime test facility that will be one of the largest in the northeast.
It will enable us to collaborate more freely with our academic, industry and government partners, and really be able to accelerate getting technology from the lab bench to the ocean at a much quicker rate.
My work contributes to Mitre's mission of solving problems for a safer world by connecting and collaborating across the entire BlueTech ecosystem.
The opportunity space is so great in terms of being able to explore and make an impact, as well as the fact that it's really an area that touches all the different pieces of our daily lives in a way that I never thought about until I started really diving into the BlueTech space.
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