Charles Turnitsa Charles Turnitsa, a VMASC project scientist who has been a leader of the Military and Homeland Security cluster, spent a decade prior to his association to ODU doing research for the US Army and NASA in the areas of data interoperability, knowledge representation and modeling.  As a PhD candidate in modeling and simulation engineering at ODU, his research is in the area of ontological representation of simulated worlds for the purpose of meaningful interoperability.  He was an author of two papers that won top awards for simulation interoperability workshops sponsored in 2007 by the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO).