Accountable for the work.

Michael Zargham, Ph.D., is the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Engineer of Dynamical Systems Group, a systems engineering and research firm that helps high-reliability organizations put emerging technology to dependable use. His work spans applied control theory, model-based systems engineering, and open-source scientific computing across aerospace, public-sector research, and the open infrastructure that science and engineering depend on.

The thread through his career is one design discipline: engineer systems so that simple, local behavior adds up to dependable behavior of the whole, whether the moving parts are robots, markets, or institutions.

Zargham helps set the technical roadmap and ecosystem direction for OpenMBEE, the open-source MBSE platform, including Flexo MMS, which brings version-control discipline to the lifecycle of engineering models. He serves on the NumFOCUS advisory council and holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied robust control and optimal resource allocation policies in distributed systems.

Nick Hirannet, P.E., PMP, is Chief Operating Officer at Dynamical Systems Group, with responsibility for the firm's day-to-day operations, including financial management, contracting, and business development. As a licensed Professional Engineer (Pennsylvania) and certified Project Management Professional, he directs engineering operations, project delivery, and the integration of emerging-technology programs into operational practice, anchoring the firm's accountability for engineering rigor and disciplined program execution in high-reliability environments.

Before joining DSG in 2018, Hirannet spent ten years at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Marine Design Center, where he served as a Mechanical Engineer, Project Manager, and Contracting Officer's Representative. In that role, he led mission-critical engineering programs across a multi-agency portfolio spanning the Army, the U.S. Coast Guard, the National Park Service, and NASA, including managing design and contract enforcement throughout the engineering lifecycle for complex physical infrastructure. His contributions were recognized with the NASA Space Flight Awareness Team Award (2015) and the USACE Commanding General Coin for Excellence (2014).

He holds a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Delaware, with study-abroad coursework at the University of Tasmania and Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.