Dr. Thomas Hedberg Jr. is a distinguished researcher and engineer specializing in systems engineering, particularly in the areas of product design, manufacturing, and lifecycle engineering. He is currently the Associate Director for Education Programs in the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) at the University of Maryland. Dr. Hedberg is focusing on research related to product design, manufacturing, and lifecycle engineering. His expertise encompasses information modeling, knowledge engineering, ontologies, system integration, and advanced optimization techniques. Dr. Hedberg previously worked at the Engineering Laboratory (EL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he managed the Model-Based Enterprise (MBE) program and co-led the Smart Manufacturing Systems Test Bed. This work earned him the Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 2019 for his exceptional leadership in developing the NIST Smart Manufacturing Systems Test Bed.

Dr. Hedberg holds a Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from Purdue University, a Master of Engineering in Engineering Management with a concentration on Systems Engineering from Pennsylvania State University, and a Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is a licensed Professional Engineer (PE) in Arizona and Maryland. His research interests also include model-based enterprise, smart manufacturing, product-lifecycle management (PLM), data and information flows across supply chains, and long-term data archival and retrieval (LOTAR). He has contributed significantly to the field, serving as the Chair of the ASME MBE Standards Committee and a voting member of various ASME standard committees. Additionally, Dr. Hedberg was a member of ISO TC184/SC4 working groups and the ISO TC184/SC4 Quality Committee.