 The research and educational opportunities at the Air Force Institute of Technology are phenomenal and are focused on national security and national defense. It's inspiring to know you're studying in the same place where other famous aphor grads like Gus Grissom and General Jimmy Doolittle earned their degrees. It's great to carry on the tradition. Building on our century-long heritage, we educate America's airmen as well as some of its soldiers, sailors, marines, and allied military partners to more effectively and innovatively deal with the national security challenges facing our country today and in the future. We teach these great military professionals how to deal with some of our toughest, most complex defense problems by thinking more critically, logically, systematically, practically, creatively, and objectively. We teach them how to take innovative solutions to both the flight line and the bottom line. We instill in them a passion for lifelong learning. AFFIT is made up of four schools. The civil engineer school provides continuing education to the civil engineering career field, graduating over 5,500 airmen annually. The school of systems and logistics provides education, consulting, and research for over 20,000 members per year for the Air Force's acquisition, contracting, and logistics workforce. The School of Strategic Force Studies provides both graduate and professional continuing education related to nuclear space and cyber operations reaching approximately 4,000 professionals annually, and the Graduate School of Engineering and Management, which includes over 750 resident masters and PhD students. AFFIT also manages the Air Force Civilian Institution Program overseeing more than 2,400 medical and graduate students at over 400 different civilian institutions. Our diverse student body includes officers enlisted in civilian personnel from all four services, defense industry contractors, and international officers from 12 different countries. Our combined mission is to provide defense focus, graduate, and continuing education to sustain the technological supremacy of the United States military. AFFIT's civil engineer school provides the knowledge our people need for success in the field. AFFIT bridges the gap between my engineering degree and the daily mission. Our education maximizes the CE force at times of limited manpower. The school provides technical, environmental, and engineering management focused education through in-resident and distance learning instruction. We provide the initial skills training for all newly commissioned civil engineer officers and newly hired civilians in the civil engineer career field. We conduct over 90 in-resident and on-location courses, plus 80 distance learning courses serving over 2,000 students every year. Distance learning enables us to provide a classroom without walls reaching across the world. The School of Systems and Logistics provides classes both on campus and through distance learning. We educate Air Force acquisition and logistics professionals, the people who field and move everything the Air Force buys. We teach logistic concepts and methodologies successfully employed at Air Force spaces like Tinker, Robbins, and Hill. Our students learn the best practices in industry. Past AFFIT grads have put what they've learned to good use, like reducing KC-135 aircraft depot maintenance from an average of 400 days to 120 days. The School of Strategic Force Studies manages the overall execution of space, nuclear, and cyber continuing education. The National Security Space Institute, located at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, provides responsive and relevant professional continuing education for the DoD's various space professional development programs. AFFIT's Nuclear College at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico provides a comprehensive nuclear professional continuing education program that is developing airmen in the nuclear enterprise. Approximately 3,000 nuclear professionals have attended our in-resident nuclear courses since 2008, and the Nuclear College has reached over 6,000 additional personnel throughout the Air Force and the DoD through its mobile training team-delivered courses. The Air Force Cyberspace Technical Center of Excellence, located at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, develops and maintains the cyberspace workforce via cutting-edge graduate and professional continuing education. Our faculty teach and direct defense-focused research on understanding and developing advanced cybersecurity related theories and technologies in areas such as critical infrastructure protection, reverse engineering, and cyber defense. Our goal is to provide relevant education to meet the cyberspace challenges of today and tomorrow. Every year in the School of Engineering and Management, our in-residence students are receiving defense-focused and research-based graduate education. They are studying and finding solutions for some of the most difficult technical challenges facing the U.S. military. There are a wide range of technical degrees at AFFIT. I was selected for the Operations Research Program so that I can develop skills to be a better analyst. I qualified for the Electrical Engineering Program and found a thesis advisor conducting remote sensor research. Now I'm working with the Air Force Research Lab and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center on new algorithms to reduce the error and geolocation estimates. The great thing about AFFIT is how relationships with former students can lead to operationally relevant research. A former student at Creature Air Force Base contacted me for help with a data analysis problem. I was able to travel there and understand firsthand the problems they were trying to solve. I incorporated their problems into two of my courses. My students were able to figure out how to reduce the time to complete an operational test from one week down to two hours, resulting in a significant cost savings. Graduate education in the School of Engineering and Management is unique because AFFIT shares Wright Patterson Air Force Base with the Air Force Research Laboratory. Working with the Air Force Research Laboratory as they lead the discovery, development and integration of airspace warfighting technologies, our students have an unmatched opportunity to conduct cutting edge defense focused research. The students have a wide range of research problems to tackle and they have access to AFFRL's world-class laboratory facilities in addition to our own. Research conducted by the Graduate School's faculty and students keeps our programs relevant and connected to the fight. In the past few years, AFFIT conducted about $100 million worth of externally sponsored research at a fraction of the cost of our commercial counterparts. One of our students improved a live-fire test arena for a portable air defense system. He built a simulation of the test arena that allowed the analysis of virtual missile explosions. The results can be used to reconfigure the collection panels in order to collect better real-world test data. Better data leads to developing better systems. There's a lot going on at AFFIT from developing our acquisition logistics, civil engineering, medical, nuclear, cyber and space professionals to conducting mission critical research to maintain our airpower advantage over potential adversaries in support of operations worldwide. Every year we provide cost-effective graduate education, cutting edge defense focused research and operationally relevant continuing education to tens of thousands of our nation's most talented military and civilian leaders. At a recent AFFIT graduation, General Mike Holmes, commander of Air Combat Command, said it very well. In my humble opinion, AFFIT offers the best professional military education the Air Force has to offer. A long tradition, continuously updated, means that we provide unique graduates that we can't get from any university anywhere else.