As Digital Practice Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Vice President, Dr. Douglas Orellana is responsible for maturing and expanding MANTECH’s Digital Practice – from developing MANTECH’s current capabilities to next-generation intelligent engineering, cloud and tactical asymmetric systems.

Dr. Orellana’s career began at Northrop Grumman Corporation, where he worked as a systems engineer and architect. He held numerous positions with increasing authority within the system engineering organization that spanned the lifecycle of various systems (unmanned vehicles, special defense, intel systems, radars, sonars, and instrumentation and controls) from concept development to verification and validation; culminating in his final role as a Systems Engineering Manager and lead architect for Northrop Grumman’s MQ-25 concept.

Dr. Orellana also worked for SAIC, culminating in a role as Director of Engineering Solutions. In this role, he positioned SAIC as an industry leader in digital engineering transformation.

Dr. Orellana has been recognized for his academic excellence, professional work and community involvement. In 2021, he was named Top 40 Under 40 by AFCEA, for his innovation and thought leadership in Digital Engineering transformation supporting Aerospace and Defense. In 2019, the Engineer’s Council awarded him Outstanding Engineering Achievement Award for his research contributions to the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge.

Dr. Orellana earned his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and master’s in Systems Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, and his Doctorate in Astronautical Engineering from the University of Southern California. His doctoral research focused on integrating human considerations into the system architecting process through the use of Model-Based Systems Engineering and Ontologies.