Edmund Prater is a Professor of Global Supply Chain Operations at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). He oversees the Veterans Business Outreach Center (VBOC) as Executive Director. The VBOC is funded by a $1.8M grant from the U.S. Small Business Administration. It supports veterans in starting businesses and teaches entrepreneurship to active duty military personnel on all military bases in north Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Dr. Prater came to academics later in life. He received his B.S. and M.S. Degrees in Electrical Engineering before entering industry. At BellSouth (now AT&T), he oversaw technology forecasting and Artificial Intelligence development and received the corporation's top award for innovation. When communism fell in Russia, he co-founded an import/export firm with offices in St. Petersburg and Moscow. He ran this for close to four years before returning to Georgia Tech and receiving an M.S. in Industrial Engineering and a Ph.D. in Operations Management. As an academic, he has published 44 peer-reviewed papers, 6 book chapters, and a textbook. He has also taught at universities in Asia and Europe for the past 20 years.
State Department Profile
Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs
Office of American Spaces
Dr. Edmund Prater serves as a data science, logistics, and business operations expert in the Office of American Spaces (ECA/A/M), which is part of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). ECA/A/M provides operational guidance as well as financial and programming resources to Posts and the over 600 American Spaces they manage worldwide, promoting greater awareness of and support for U.S. culture and foreign policy goals among foreign publics. Edmund advises ECA/A/M on data-informed approaches to evaluating the effects of locating American Centers on-compound and/or in the same cities as American Corners, the relative balance of sub-regional portfolios, approaches to data validation that will improve data quality for OASIS (the Office of American Spaces Information System), scaling up the analyses available in the American Spaces Explorer (ASE) and Competitor Center Navigator (CCN) dashboards, and rolling out OASIS as well as a Monitoring and Evaluation Toolkit for use by Posts and Spaces worldwide. Additionally, he has connected with entrepreneurship initiatives within ECA as well as the Countering Violent Extremism group. As a result, he has led the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) Veterans Business Outreach Center to host this year's Ukrainian Veterans Conference, an important effort to integrate Ukrainian veterans into civilian life. He has also supported the U.S. Consulate Beijing's e-sports initiative through coordinating the filming of a series of social media spots at UTA, which has several championship e-sports teams, and in Arlington, Texas, which hosts the largest e-sports arena in North America.
|
