Thomas “Tom” Houser initially served a career as an Army Aviator and later as a staff officer. Early in his career, he completed two combat tours in Vietnam, where he flew helicopters and commanded two aviation units.  On the Army Staff, he was the Executive Officer to the Director of Force Development in DCSOPS.  Later, he served in the Strategic Defense Initiative in its initial stages and was responsible for all ground-based kinetic energy weapon systems. Tom became the President and COO of MEVATEC Corporation in 1989, which was acquired by BAE Systems in 2003. During this 14-year span, MEVATEC grew from $50,000 in sales to over $120 million and won numerous awards for excellence. At BAE Systems, he continued to run daily operations for a business unit with annual sales of $250M.  He also supported strategic planning and mergers and acquisitions at BAE and later became a Managing Director of ISI Partners, an investment banking firm, specializing in mergers and acquisitions of companies in the government services sector. Mr. Houser joined S3, Inc. as President in April 2010, responsible for technical program execution and tactical corporate growth.  With S3’s 2014 formation of System Studies and Simulation International, a subsidiary of S3, Tom agreed to apply his experience to growing startup businesses to develop S3I. He is currently the COO of Whitespace Innovations, a business growth mentoring firm specializing in developing effective metrics-based strategies and guiding clients through capture and proposal development for key opportunities. Mr. Houser received a B.S. in Management and Economics from the University of Tampa and an M.S. in Electronic Warfare Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School, where he did research in the area of refractive effects on tactical electromagnetic systems. Mr. Houser is married to Jean and has four children, Scott, Allen, Wendy, and Mark.  He is a Trustee of Samford University and serves on corporate and charitable boards.