Laura A. McNamara is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She works in the Exploratory Simulations Technologies Department as part of an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists who study issues of modeling and simulation, verification and validation, uncertainty quantification, and decision making. As an organizational anthropologist, McNamara conducts field studies with teams that are attempting to develop and/or integrate modeling and simulation tools into their work processes. She has worked with the Missile Defense Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the nuclear weapons programs at Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories to identify both the limitations of, and leverage points for, the effective use of modeling and simulation technologies in interdisciplinary research and development projects. Her research interests include expert knowledge elicitation, knowledge representation, distributed cognition, collaboration, uncertainty quantification, and verification and validation for social and behavioral modeling and simulation technologies.