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Katherine L. Morse, a computer scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in Laurel, Maryland, has been awarded the NATO Science and Technology Organization’s (STO) Scientific Achievement Award (SAA), the highest honor presented in NATO to science and technology working groups.

The SAA recognizes exceptional accomplishments in STO collaborative and in-house activities conducted and completed within the last four years that have a significant impact to NATO, the technology community and the nation.

The SAA was awarded to NATO M&S Group 136 – Modelling and Simulation as a Service. Morse worked on detailed discovery metadata for composition and rapid deployment of simulation services. She and her two teammates on this task also won a best paper award for a paper on their efforts at the 2016 Simulation Innovation Workshop.

Working on this NATO project for more than two years required quite a bit of coordination, said Morse. The success of the effort is also due to the efforts of all 16 contributing nations: Germany, the United States, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Poland, Turkey, Canada, Portugal, Australia, Romania, the United Kingdom, Austria and Norway, she said.

The award came as a complete surprise, Morse said; but “it’s near the top of awards I’ve received; it’s pretty cool to be recognized for an international work project,” she added. “It’s a reminder of the importance of working with our allies as we will have to fight with them.”

Morse has more than 35 years of programming, software engineering, security engineering and computer science experience. She was a key contributor to the development of the Department of Defense and IEEE standards for the High Level Architecture for Modeling and Simulation and the technical lead for the Federation Engineering Agreements Template Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization standard. She has also been a contributor to the IEEE Distributed Simulation Engineering and Execution Process from its early development.

She has also pioneered several technologies in web-enabled simulation, including web-enabled High Level Architecture (HLA) and integration of web-based instructional content with HLA federations.

Prior to coming to APL in 2008, Morse worked at SAIC as a technical fellow, assistant vice president of technology and chief federation engineer. She has two bachelor’s degrees — in math and Russian — and a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Arizona as well as a master’s degree and Ph.D. in information and computer science from the University of California, Irvine.

The awards ceremony was held in September at the Fall NATO Science and Technology Board meeting in Edinburgh, United Kingdom.