Ms. Heidi Buck joined the Naval Information Warfare Center, Pacific (NIWC PAC) in 2002 after receiving her Master’s Degree from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in Electrical Engineering with a focus in Signal and Image Processing. She spent 13 years of her career at NIWC PAC working on computer vision systems to support the warfighter, focused primarily on automatic target recognition systems. In 2008 she received a Navy’s Top Scientist and Engineer Award for her work in these fields.

In January 2015 she founded the Battlespace Exploitation of Mixed Reality (BEMR) Lab, a space for innovative thinkers to leverage low cost commercial sector technology in the mixed reality (virtual and augmented reality) space for collaboration between warfighter, researcher, government, industry and academia. Since then the lab has received national attention, including visits from the Secretary of Defense, Congressmen, Fortune 500 CEOs, military leaders and numerous other VIPs and has been the recipient of two Secretary of the Navy Innovation Awards for technology that began in the lab as warfighter concepts.