Kristen Baldwin is a principal deputy in the Defense Department, where she serves as the deputy assistant secretary for systems engineering within the office of the assistant secretary for research and development.
She is responsible for engineering and technical workforce, policy, and acquisition program implementation across the department and focuses on concept engineering and analysis, design, development and manufacturing, and independent program review and assessment for all of the department’s major weapon system acquisition programs.
Baldwin also serves as the department’s systems engineering workforce leader with responsibility for more than 40,000 department acquisition professionals and leads the department’s Systems 2020 initiative focused on designing systems for adaptability.
As the department’s director for systems analysis, she oversees development planning and modeling and simulation activities across the department, while leading cyber and system assurance, program protection, systems engineering for systems of systems and research and development initiatives. She also oversees the department’s Systems Engineering Research Center, a university-affiliated research center which researches systems engineering methods, processes and tools.
She joined the office of the secretary of defense in 1998, where she has since led capabilities-based planning in the acquisition process and has focused on requirements, acquisition and programming processes.
Baldwin has also served as deputy director of software intensive systems and managed the Tri-Service Assessment Initiative.
Prior to joining the OSD, she served as a science and technology adviser in the Army’s office of the deputy chief of staff for operations and plans and in a dismounted battlespace battle lab at Fort Benning, Ga.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Virginia Tech and a master’s degree in systems management from Florida Tech.