Employee Spotlight: Sally Sutherland-Pietrzak, NAVSEA Warfare Centers Headquarters

Employee Spotlight: Sally Sutherland-Pietrzak, NAVSEA Warfare Centers Headquarters

By NAVSEA Warfare Centers Headquarters Corporate Communications

Sally Sutherland-Pietrzak won the "Strengthen the NAVSEA Team" award earlier this year for development of the Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) Talent Pipeline knowledge sharing site, but that's only a small part of what she does. The director of the Naval Engineering Education Consortium (NEEC) and university outreach director for Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) Warfare Centers Headquarters, she has been supporting the Navy in various roles for nearly four decades, starting her career as an engineer at the Naval Underwater Systems Center (NUSC) in New London, Connecticut.

NUSC became Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Newport Division in Newport, Rhode Island, where she held increasingly key leadership positions, including manager of the Signal Processing & Environmental Acoustics Branch and Submarine Prototype Development Branch, director of the Science & Technology (S&T) Division within the Sensors and Sonar Department, and Deputy Chief Technology Officer before becoming NEEC Director in 2019.

In addition to her technical expertise - including authoring over 40 technical reports, memorandums and published papers and receiving a number of prestigious awards - her international experience includes a role as a U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) exchange scientist to the Defence S&T Group in

Australia, and a research engineer position at the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation in Italy.

All of those experiences helped shape her idea of creating the Warfare Centers Knowledge (WCK) Forum in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, when many events started taking place virtually, making them more accessible for distance learning across commands. The centralized internal site shares professional development opportunities and information about technical briefs, seminars and lectures - including several series Sutherland-Pietrzak organizes and hosts with partners such as ONR Global, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Naval War College and Five Eyes S&T (formerly The Technical Cooperation Program).

"I just thought with 10 Warfare Center Divisions full of amazing people doing amazing work, it would be so beneficial to be able to share that information," Sutherland-Pietrzak said at the time. She was recognized with a 2023 Warfare Centers Knowledge Sharing Award for that effort.

The AI-ML Talent Pipeline is an outgrowth of the WCK Forum and Sutherland-Pietrzak's work with the Warfare Centers' S&T Health Assessment, which identified successfully building and leveraging AI and ML skills as a common challenge. By collecting and sharing resources and engaging subject matter experts across the Naval Research & Development Enterprise, the Pipeline is working to address this challenge, earning acknowledgement in the 2024 NAVSEA Excellence Awards.

"Having worked at NUWC Newport and now NAVSEA Warfare Centers HQ, I am consistently impressed by the talent of our personnel," Sutherland-Pietrzak said. "Recognizing the significance of our work, I am committed to supporting a robust and capable Warfare Centers team to be prepared for future challenges."