Dr. Greg Wilson

Greg Wilson is a Technical Staff Member and a qualitative researcher in the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He team uses qualitative methods to characterize large and complex socio-technical systems so that quantitative tools can be brought to bear. Dr. Wilson's research focuses on multidisciplinary communication, expert judgment elicitation, complex problem definition, and information representation. He specializes in working with subject matter experts to get to the heart of complex problems so that sophisticated quantitative and computer modeling tools can be brought to bear to assist in decision making.

Research Interests include:

- Elicitation and Representation of Expert Judgment and Technical Knowledge
- Ethnography in Technical Settings
- Multidisciplinary Problem Solving
- Incommensurability Between Technical Discourse Communities
- Science and Technology Studies
- Postmodern and Poststructuralist Rhetoric

My research focuses on the cultural studies of science. Working in a national lab setting, I'm primarily interested in how institutions and individual scientists/engineers come to "know" things about the physical world and engineered systems. As a rhetorician, language practices are the lens I use to view the world.

The work I do at Los Alamos directly applies to the assessment of the reliability and performance of complex systems. The team I'm on builds qualitative models of complex systems so that statistical and other quantitative tools can be applied to assess the reliability of these systems. The complexity of these systems usually makes direct application of quantitative tools unfeasible, and the qualitative models serve as a bridge to facilitate quantitative assessment. These methods have been applied to assessing the reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, global industrial operations, DoD systems, and Homeland Security projects.