Mr. Robert Richardson IV

Assistant Professor/Visiting Professor DISA Chair

Cyberspace Governance, Cybersecurity Technology

Air Domain

Areas of Interest:

Cybersecurity technology, air domain 

Mr. Richardson serves as the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Chair and adjunct faculty in the College of Information and Cyber (CIC). In his DISA Chair role he serves as the liaison between DISA and NDU focusing on educating and developing future cyber leaders on cybersecurity and DoD Information Network (DODIN) enterprise capabilities. 

Over a 40 plus year career, Mr. Richardson has held technology related leadership positions in the U.S. Air Force, as a Federal contractor, and now as a DISA Federal employee.  Starting of as USAF officer, he had assignments across a range of the ICBM, electronic warfare, and strategic airlift systems. He is command pilot with 3400+ hours in EC-130H COMPASS CALL and C-5A/B GALAXY aircrafts. His cyber background started in the late 1990s as a system administrator and integrator on a variety of Intelligence Community contracts. He started with DISA in 2003 as its first GIG Operations Tech Director, then ran its DoD Directory Services (2007-2009), then architect its Cyber situation awareness capabilities (2009-2011. In 2011, he was appoint the Chair of the DoD (Cyber) Security Authorization Working Group (DSAWG), the Department’s tier I cybersecurity risk review panel for enterprise wide information systems on the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN) and across the Department of Defense Information Networks (DoDIN). In 2019, he joined the NDU faculty.

Mr. Richardson is a retired USAFR Colonel. He has M.S. in Strategic Studies from the U.S. Army War College (2003), a M.A. in History (Airpower) from University of Alabama (1995), and a B.S. in Chemistry from St Lawrence University (1978).