Holly A. H. Handley is a Professor in the Engineering Management and System Engineering Department. Her education includes a BS in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson College (1984), a MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley (1987) and a MBA from the University of Hawaii (1995). She received a PhD in Information Technology and Engineering from George Mason University in 1999. Dr. Handley is a Licensed Professional Electrical Engineer from the state of Washington. She is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Senior Grade, the International Council on System Engineers (INCOSE) and Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society.

Dr. Handley applies systems engineering principles and experience in computational modeling to conduct research and perform analysis on challenging problems of complex human centric systems. Her research has been funded by the Department of the Army, the Office of Naval Research and small business collaborators. Dr. Handley participated in a NATO collaborative team  to develop human view representations to augment system engineering design products and in a US Army collaborative team to develop system focused representations at the soldier level. She also participated as a core team member on the development of Human Readiness Levels. She received the 2015 Dean’s Excellence Award in Engagement and was selected as a 2016 Entsminger Fellow. In 2018 she was named a IEEE Systems Council Distinguished Lecturer and a Human Factors & Ergonomics Society (HFES) Science Policy Fellow. In 2021 she was named a Provost Fellow in Data Science, which was renewed in 2022.

Dr. Handley began her career as a Design Engineer at Raytheon Submarine Signal Division in Portsmouth, RI. She then accepted a position as a CMOS Application Engineer at Raytheon Semiconductor Division in Mountain View, CA, and later became a Senior Field Engineer in Vicenza, Italy. After completing a post doctoral position as a Research Associate Professor at the System Architecture Laboratory at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, Dr. Handley became a Principal Investigator at Pacific Science & Engineering Group in San Diego, CA.