Turner College Alum Brett Reichert Earns PhD from Cornell University

CSU alum Brett Reichert enrolled in the Turner College's MSOL program in 2013 as an Aide-de-Camp Infantry Commandant in the U.S. Army and a graduate in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Kentucky. He completed the degree requirements for the MSOL degree in 2014 and three years later, in 2017, began pursuit of a master's degree in policy management at Georgetown University. During this period, he rose to Aide-de-Camp Deputy Commanding General, Regional Command East in Afghanistan, and then over to Company Commander in the 82nd Airborne Division. After completing the master's degree program at Georgetown University, Reichert moved to a staff position in the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and later to Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff of the Army. Prior to entering Cornell University, he served as a Brigade Executive Officer in the 4th Infantry Division. Reichert's most recent professional experience is Battalion Commander in the 82nd Airborne Division. 

Reichert's doctoral dissertation is titled, "The Silicon Backbone: Mapping and Analyzing the U.S. DoD Semiconductor Supply Chain." The dissertation develops a reproducible workflow for extending visibility under partial observability without collapsing the distinction between disclosure, inference, and observation. Using fixed candidate pools, temporal evaluation, calibrated ensembling, and conservative operating rules, it recovers likely hidden tiers beyond prime-facing visibility and then prunes the broader DoD supplier network to the semiconductor dependency structure most relevant for analysis. The results of Reichert's research show that vulnerability is not evenly distributed. It concentrates in identifiable chokepoints, corridor intermediaries, and brittle dependency paths that can deny or degrade semiconductor support to DoD-linked primes if disrupted. The dissertation therefore evaluates structural consequence conditional on disruption through reachability loss, flow-based impact, brokerage, bridging, and path redundancy, while treating disruption probability as a distinct concept that is framed but not estimated directly. Turner Business congratulates Brett in this latest outstanding academic accomplishment.