Colin Dempsey

Colin Dempsey is a lead systems engineer and senior member of the technical staff at the SEI, where he serves as principal investigator on research projects advancing rigorous, scalable model-based systems engineering (MBSE) practices for defense programs. His work focuses on operationalization of MBSE by designing solution architectures, advancing systems and enterprise modeling, and the integration of full-lifecycle systems engineering with software development, to improve design clarity, analysis rigor, interoperability, and stakeholder decision‑making. He also leads research into AI-enabled MBSE, integrating large language models with SysML v2 toolchains to improve the efficiency and rigor of technical milestone reviews. He actively serves as a technical advisor to government program offices on MBSE and digital engineering adoption strategy.

He brings extensive systems engineering experience from his years working in industry, much of it spent applying MBSE and digital engineering on active acquisition programs. He has established model architectures and governance for enterprise modeling environments, developed tooling that generates interface control documentation and engineering artifacts directly from system models, and led requirements decomposition, interface definition, and integration efforts for complex hardware and software systems. He has also trained government engineering teams to independently manage and review model-based artifacts, building organic capability within the programs he supports.

He received his master's degree in systems engineering, with honors, from Johns Hopkins University and his bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Dayton. He is a certified model user in SysMLv2 and SysML through the EDM Association, an active member of INCOSE, and holds a PMP certification from the Project Management Institute.