The Team

Spiros Dimolitsas, PhD

Senior Vice President for Research & Chief Technology Officer

Spiros Dimolitsas was appointed Senior Vice President for Research & Chief Technology Officer at Georgetown University in July 2011. In this newly created role, he leads Georgetown’s development of innovation alliances and partnerships with industry, universities, and national laboratories domestically and overseas to address complex socio-technical problems of our time in such fields as health, security and sustainability. He works collaboratively with leaders across the University to promote research, secure investments in University-based programs, and oversee multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional research programs, and the Office of Technology Commercialization.

Prior to this role, Dr. Dimolitsas was Senior Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer of Georgetown University from November 2001 until July 2011. In that role he was responsible for a number of functions that included facilities, information technology, public safety, technology commercialization, human resources, and student dining and housing among others.

Dr. Dimolitsas held other positions before joining Georgetown University. Between 1995 and 2001, he served as Senior Executive for Engineering and Associate Director of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), an applied-science national security organization. In this capacity Dr. Dimolitsas’ 2,500-person division led the engineering design of the world’s largest laser nuclear-fusion facility (the National Ignition Facility); and the design, fabrication and fielding of systems for cyber operations, environmental, energy and counter-proliferation related to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.

Prior to LLNL, Dr. Dimolitsas held a variety of management positions with the Communications Satellite Corporation (Comsat), where he pioneered technology related to voice and data communications over fixed and mobile networks. At Comsat, he also led the development and implementation of several international telecommunication systems and standards. Prior to Comsat, Dr. Dimolitsas worked with the United Technologies Corporation and the Mayo Clinic in the semi-conductor and biomedical industries, respectively, in the United States and Europe. He also consulted with the Smart Technology Venture Fund, and has served on the Board of Directors of Maxoptix Corporation and Breece-Hill Technologies.

Dr. Dimolitsas’ expertise in large-scale science and technology, high-tech/high-risk project management and technology commercialization has formed the basis for advice that has been provided on innovation and on complex-systems risk management to the US Government and others. He also represents Georgetown University in a variety of fora on climate issues, including the World Economic Forum’s Global University Leadership Forum on Sustainability.

Dr. Dimolitsas holds a B.S. in Theoretical Physics with Honors from Sussex University in England; a M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from Imperial College and Queen Mary College –London; and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Sussex University. In 1992, he received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers outstanding achievement medallion, and in 1995 was elected Fellow of the Institute. In 2013, he was inducted to the National Academy of Inventors. He has published more than 60 peer reviewed scientific papers and holds eight patents in the field of data and encrypted mobile communications.

Robert Beckman, MD

Scientific Advisor

Robert Beckman, M.D. is currently Professor of Oncology and of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, and Biomathematics at Georgetown University Medical Center. He is an oncology clinical researcher and mathematical biologist, whose goals are to develop cancer therapies and to improve the way cancer therapies are developed and deployed in patients, with emphasis on personalized medicine, tumor heterogeneity, and tumor evolution.

Educated at Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Beckman did his clinical training in Pediatrics at Stanford University and Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at the University of Michigan, and postdoctoral work in nucleic acid and protein biophysics at Fox Chase Cancer Center (on a National Cancer Institute Physician Scientist Award) and the Bristol Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute. Previous appointments include the University of Michigan Biophysics faculty; Member in Systems Biology, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Visiting Scientist at the Biomolecular Structure and Drug Design Group, Warner Lambert Pharmaceuticals.

Dr. Beckman has played significant leadership roles in developing new oncology clinical research groups at 4 pharmaceutical companies. His clinical research career spans numerous pathways and technology platforms. He has brought 23 molecules into early development, 5 into late development and 2 to market, and pioneered one of the first oncology clinical research programs in pediatric cancers. He has particular expertise in antibody therapy of cancer.

Dr. Beckman has invented novel clinical strategies for proof of concept studies and for biomarker driven clinical development, including a confirmatory basket trial. He currently leads an international group of approximately 200 government, industry, and academic statisticians and clinicians at the Drug Information Association (DIA), working on adaptive clinical trial designs as well as a subgroup devoted to small populations, including biomarker defined subsets.Dr. Beckman studies cancer evolution and its impact on optimization of therapeutic strategies. These studies predicted broad features of tumor sequencing results before these were available, and have more recently led to a new approach to cancer precision medicine, dynamic precision medicine, which holds promise for significant improvement in patient outcomes. 

Dr. Beckman’s versatile publication record of approximately 250 articles, patents, and abstracts ranges from computational chemistry to clinical oncology, emphasizing quantitative approaches.

Mary Beth Fargo, J.D.

Senior Advisor

Mary Beth Fargo received her undergraduate degree from Providence College in 1984 and her law degree from Georgetown University in 1988. She has been affiliated with Georgetown for many years and returned to Georgetown University Hospital on a full-time basis in 1989 after working in the juvenile courts of the State of Maryland for a private law firm. At the Medical Center, Ms. Fargo served in several roles, including budget analyst, contracts administrator, and Y2K Compliance Director. In May 2000, she began working for the University as the Manager of Financial Analysis and became the CFO for University Services in October 2003. She began her current role as Senior Advisor for Strategic Research Development & Operations in July, 2011.

Johanna Lund

Executive Assistant

For the last twenty+ years Johanna has worked at Georgetown University in several administrative and operational roles, ensuring that her department and leadership staff have had the support to operate smoothly, successfully, and efficiently. Prior to her current role as Executive Assistant to the Senior Vice President of Research, she was the Office Manager & EA to the University Librarian, served as IT Hardware Program Manager within University Information Services, and EA to the Deputy Chief Information Officer.

Daniel Kitaro Jarris

Senior Project Manager, Health Data Analytics Program

Daniel Kitaro Jarris is the senior project manager of the Health Data Analytics in the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research at Georgetown, where he manages programmatic and administrative aspects of all ATra™ Black Box projects. He works closely with health department partners and internal stakeholders to provide training, technical assistance, and updates on project activities. Prior to joining Georgetown, he worked at the DC Department of Health, where he led the Variant Monitoring and Surveillance Team during the COVID-19 response.

Anne Rhodes, PhD

Director, Health Data Analytics Program

Dr. Anne Rhodes is the director of the Health Data Analytics Program in the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research at Georgetown, where she leads efforts to match data across public health jurisdictions using a novel privacy-assuring data technology.  She previously worked at the Virginia Department of Health and led efforts there to integrate data from HIV Surveillance, Ryan White, STI, Medicaid and other systems to improve the accuracy, timeliness, and completeness of data used for public health policy.  She has her doctorate in Epidemiology from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and worked at VCU, where she designed data systems for public health and provided technical assistance to public health and community-based organizations.  She joined the Georgetown team in January 2021.  

J. C. Smart, PhD

Chief Scientist

Dr. J. C. Smart (smart@georgetown.edu) is a Research Professor at Georgetown University where he serves as Chief Scientist of its AvesTerra Initiative for the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research. In this role, Dr. Smart is responsible for the technical leadership and strategic oversight of Georgetown’s multidisciplinary, integrative science activity to build an extreme-scale knowledge representation of the planet to address issues of sustainability, global health, and global security.

Starting in 2011, Dr. Smart transitioned to Georgetown from Raytheon where he had served as the Chief Technology Officer for the Intelligence and Information Systems (IIS) business. In this prior role, Dr. Smart was responsible for managing advanced technology research, development and partnerships for the Intelligence Community and Homeland Defense/Security sector. Prior to joining Raytheon in October, 2007, Dr. Smart served as the Senior Technical Director of the National Security Operations Center (NSOC) at the National Security Agency (NSA), Fort Meade, Maryland. Among his contributions there were the computer science theory and technology for a series of significant large-scale projects stemming from his original graph theoretic approach to knowledge representation and reasoning systems. Dr. Smart began his technical career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) where in 1996 he founded the Information Operations, Warfare, and Assurance Center (IOWA), serving as both its first Director and Chief Scientist. This work subsequently led to the creation the “BAG” system that was heavily leveraged at NSA and in DARPA’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program.

His current independent research interests include the theory, design, and implementation of an innovative, dynamic knowledge processing architecture for high analytic yield, secure computing, privacy assurance, and real-time distributed mission management and decision support, all at global scale. His specialties include advanced analytics, high-assurance cyber security, graph-theoretic knowledge representation, and high-performance computation. Dr. Smart completed his undergraduate studies at Northwestern University in 1980, earning a B.S. in Electrical Engineering with special emphasis in computer science and logic. He completed his M.S. in computer science in 1986 and his Ph.D. in computer science in 1994, both at the University of California – Davis through the Department of Applied Science.

Miranda Smith MSW

Data Analyst, Health Data Analytics Program

Miranda Smith is the data analyst for the Health Data Analytics Program in the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research at Georgetown. She works closely with Research Administration colleagues, University Information Services partners, and external clients collecting the technical and functionality requirements for the ATra Black Box projects. She has over 20 years of experience working in HIV Care and Prevention data collection. Before joining Georgetown, she worked as a database developer and program analyst at the Virginia Department of Health’s Department of Disease Prevention. Prior to that, Miranda worked as the data analyst for Virginia’s Ryan White program at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center for Public Policy. She received her Master of Social Work from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2006.