President

David O. Smith, President and COO at LightGrid, LLC, is a Subject Matter Expert (SME) focusing on Network Optimization and Modernization, enterprise capabilities, network deployment, and network decommissioning.

Mr. Smith has supported the Department of Defense (DoD) for over 15 years and is currently supporting the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Infrastructure Executive (IE) as Network Architect. He currently supports DISA’s 100G IP Core Upgrade, Global IP Transport, and DISN Network Optimization efforts.

Before Mr. Smith started with LightGrid, he worked for Science Application International Corporation (SAIC) as a project lead. David managed transition teams consisting of engineers, implementation teams, and site survey teams to transition telecommunication networks from service providers to an in- house government owned and managed large scale optical based core infrastructure.Prior to SAIC, Mr. Smith worked for Booz Allen Hamilton. He worked with several DoD clients to resolve interoperability issues within the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN)/ Government Information Grid – Bandwidth expansion (GIG-BE) framework. Mr. Smith has also lead DISA’s three Metro Area Network (MAN) decommissioning projects as the Program Lead for Network Services.

Mr. Smith is a graduate of The Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a M.S. in Information and Telecommunication Systems in Business. He also earned a B.S. in Computer and Information Sciences from Shepherd University. Mr. Smith was also published by the Information Assurance Technology Analysis Center (IATAC) IANewsletter, “GIG-BE – Improving the Warfighter’s Information Pipline”.

Mr. Smith is involved in several charities, including the National Kidney Foundation and Project Healing Waters.