LEADERSHIP BIOS

Mark Lee

Chief Executive Officer

Mark Lee is a recognized leader in government services with extensive experience building and leading businesses at the intersection of science, engineering, and technology. Prior to joining ERT, he served as Chief Technology Executive for ICF, a publicly traded global consulting and technology services company. In this role, Mark drove the company’s overall technology strategy and implementation through his leadership of ICF’s client-facing technology business and the company’s Chief Technology Officer function. Mark’s team provided technology, digital solutions, and advanced data and analytics tools to help clients deliver practical programs that lead to positive outcomes in areas such as health, environment, climate, energy, and disaster recovery.

Mark previously served as the executive vice president of ICF’s public sector business and spent over 25 years with the firm. During his time leading ICF’s public sector business, he led the development and implementation of the strategy used to rapidly expand ICF’s technology footprint, largely through three strategic acquisitions. Through these efforts, ICF grew its technology business from $50M to over $500M in under three years.

Mark currently serves on the board of directors for the Public Health Foundation at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. He was also recognized by WashingtonExec as a Top Public Sector Leader to Watch in 2020 and 2021 and previously served as an executive committee member for the Professional Services Council (PSC) and chair of its Civilian Executive Advisory Board.

Mark holds a Master of Science and a Bachelor of Science in Public Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Jingli Yang

Jingli Yang

Cofounder and Principal

Dr. Jingli Yang, co-Founder and Principal of ERT, is an accomplished marketer, strategist, and entrepreneur. Dr. Yang was instrumental in positioning ERT as a strong competitor in the Science and IT contracting space, cultivating business relationships with partners and customers, while working to develop infrastructure and processes necessary to foster the growth of ERT during her nearly 25 years with the organization. Under her leadership as President and then CEO, the company enjoyed continuous growth and expansion of its client base while maintaining a focus on both customer satisfaction and employee welfare.  Dr. Yang now serves in an advisory role, helping to maintain and strengthen customer relations and help support future growth for the company.

Dr. Yang holds a Ph.D. in Biogeography, Geographic Information Sciences, and Remote Sensing from the University of Maryland and has over 20 years of experience in Earth remote sensing, science data systems, and geospatial interoperability for NASA and NOAA. Prior to ERT, she held a series of progressively more responsible technical and management positions in the Earth remote sensing and satellite data systems fields with companies including Raytheon and Space Imaging EOSAT. Upon joining ERT in 2003, Dr. Yang served as President of ERT for several years, during which she initiated ERT’s Earth remote sensing science support and science data systems development and maintenance activities.

Dr. Yang serves on the Board of Visitors of the University of Maryland’s College of Behavioral and Social Sciences and is active in both the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union. She has previously served as both President and Vice President of the Maryland Space Business Roundtable (MSBR), Chair of the NASA Goddard Contractors’ Association, and member of the Maryland Federal Facility Advisory Board under Governor O’Malley. She has received numerous awards including a NASA Global Change Research Fellowship, National Geographic Young Explorer award, and the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing’s Ta Liang Memorial Award. ERT and Dr. Yang were featured in the 2014 NASA Office of Small Business Programs Spotlight publication highlighting Women-Owned Small Businesses.

Peter Li

Peter Li

Cofounder and Principal

Dr. Peter Li founded ERT in 1993, providing geophysical survey support to environmental and engineering companies. After gaining its reputation as the go-to company for geophysical services in Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area, ERT expanded to include environmental and GIS services serving the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), and Maryland state and county government agencies. Dr. Li was instrumental in winning ERT’s first $10M prime contract with USACE in 2004. Over the past 30+ years, Dr. Li has led ERT’s business development effort and won more than 50 prime contracts with all NOAA line offices, five NASA centers, and USACE. ERT’s services expanded under his leadership to include information technology (IT) support, engineering services, scientific analysis, and data system development. Dr. Li continues to support the company’s Business Development efforts and strategic growth initiatives. His legacy of prioritizing customer satisfaction, mentorship and training, and leadership development remain at the core of ERT’s values.

Dr. Li received his Doctoral degree in Geological Sciences with a focus on Geophysics from Rutgers University. He is a Certified Professional Geologist in Virginia, a member of the Society of American Military Engineers, and a member of the Maryland Space Business Roundtable. Dr. Li has more than 30 years of experience in environmental science and engineering, geographic information system application, geotechnical engineering, geophysical survey, and hydrogeologic investigation. Prior to founding ERT, he served as a Project Manager of environmental remediation projects for Louis Berger & Associates and Chester Engineers, respectively.

Jon Meyer

Chief Financial Officer

Jon Meyer has deep experience in finance, accounting, and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) for services and technology firms across numerous industries. Prior to ERT, Jon’s career has spanned a myriad of roles across client service, public company, and portfolio company contexts.

Jon began his career serving private equity clients as an auditor and financial diligence practitioner at PwC. He then continued his M&A career via corporate development at ICF, a publicly traded global consulting and technology services company. In his time both at PwC and ICF, Jon led and managed financial and cross-functional due diligence on hundreds of businesses spanning a wide variety of industries. During Jon’s ICF tenure, the firm successfully acquired and integrated ten companies with over $700M in combined enterprise value, fueling the firm’s growth of over 60% to $1.8B revenue and 8,500+ employees.

Following his time at ICF and prior to joining ERT, Jon served as CFO of a sponsor-backed process safety management consulting firm, where he oversaw all aspects of finance, accounting, corporate development, and investor relations. Jon’s focus as a CFO is to drive growth through transformation, injection of best practice, and sound financial strategy. He is passionate about growth stories and unlocking the multifaceted benefits they provide for all stakeholders.

Jon holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Economics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) and a Master of Accounting from The College of William and Mary.

Chris Rodriguez

Chief Growth Officer

Mr. Chris Rodriguez is an established executive with experience building and leading growth teams across a wide variety of fields. He has worked every phase of the business development process—from client relations through capture and solution development to the production and delivery of the proposal. With a focus on finding ways to differentiate strategy while remaining attuned to customer needs, he has worked and won over $3B worth of business across a wide range of customers, including the US Departments of State, Homeland Security, and Justice; NASA; NOAA; and the Department of Defense, including US Air Force, US Space Force, the Defense Logistics Agency, and the US Army. Chris is also experienced in operating internationally, having supported projects in Europe and the Middle East.

Chris previously worked as a strategic advisor supporting clients in the areas of IT, cybersecurity, human capital consulting, development and sustainment, operations, and engineering. He served as Vice President of Business Development at ASRC Federal, where he led a team focused on delivering growth in the NASA, NOAA, and USSF markets. Prior to that, he served as the Director of Business Development for PAE National Security Solutions.

Chris holds a Masters in Global Security from John Hopkins University and a Bachelor of Arts in English language and literature and Spanish language and literature from the University of Virginia.

Michelle Roenick

Chief Administrative Officer

Ms. Michelle Roenick has spent more than 25 years in the Government Contracting industry supporting organizations ranging in size from $10M to over $10B. Ms. Roenick has extensive expertise in working with Government clients in multiple Civilian and DoD agencies, NASA, and NOAA. Ms. Roenick has held leadership positions within organizations performing and overseeing many back-office activities including budgeting, forecasting, finance, pricing, and contracts administration. As a strategic financial analysis player, Ms. Roenick has also supported the successful sale of two organizations.

As ERT’s Chief Administrative Officer, Ms. Roenick serves as a member of the executive management team collaborating with the team to ensure functional excellence for all Operational Departments of ERT’s infrastructure. As the CAO, Ms. Roenick provides the leadership, management, and strategic understanding necessary to ensure ERT’s processes, policies, and internal controls effectively support ERT’s annual strategic goals and objectives to grow the organization. Ms. Roenick also partners with the Chief Financial Officer to maintain and increase ERT’s financial strength and operating efficiencies to create more of a competitive edge.

Ms. Roenick received her Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from George Mason University.

Andy Nappi

Chief Strategy Officer and Vice President, Engineering Services Business Unit

Mr. Andy Nappi has 38 years’ experience in a variety of positions in the aerospace and defense industries. As ERT’s Chief Strategy Officer, he serves as a member of the executive management team, working with the team to develop and implement a strategic vision for the company that focuses on effective growth, developing strategic goals for business development efforts, and leading/participating in capture management and proposal support. He also supports program assessment, evolution, and improvement and helps build new partnerships that enable the company to achieve sustainable growth.

Mr. Nappi brings extensive experience in business/program management and business development, focused on science, engineering, and IT programs. He also brings expertise in the Civil sector, especially NOAA, NASA, JPL, and TSA.

Mr. Nappi’s previous positions include Operations Director, where he worked to enhance program performance, develop, and implement strategy, improve hiring practices, and win new and follow-on business; as Capture Manager, Deputy PM, and PM for a $330M program with the National Weather Service, and as a Business Unit Lead.

He holds a Master of Science degree in Meteorology from Penn State University.

Chang Zhao

Chang Zhao

Vice President, Science and Information Technology Business Unit

Ms. Chang Zhao is a Vice President of ERT, leading the Science and Information Technology Business Unit. Her primary roles are leading business development, contract operations, and performance delivery; and nurturing customer relationships and industry collaboration partnerships. While managing more than two dozen contracts with over 250 employees and $30M annual revenue, she also serves as a program manager for multiple ERT ProTech IDIQ contracts within the Fisheries, Oceans, and Weather Domains. Working closely with five NOAA line offices (NMFS, NOS, NWS, NESDIS, OAR) plus NOAA headquarters (OED), her portfolio covers a wide spectrum of areas of climate prediction, water prediction, weather processing systems, sustainable fisheries, habitat conservation, geodetic survey, coast survey, air resources management, IT infrastructure, cyber security, and software engineering.

Since joining ERT in 2008, Ms. Zhao has gained an abundance of experience in NOAA science, IT technologies, and contract management. With her deep understanding of customer needs, strong technical knowledge, and seasoned leadership skills, Ms. Zhao has created many high value solutions for the government and delivered some of ERT’s most innovative solutions including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud services.

Robert Haynes

Robert Haynes

Vice President, OMS Business Unit

As Vice President of the Science Mission Business Unit, Mr. Haynes provides leadership and management of the Business Unit’s strategic growth initiatives, customer base expansion, new opportunity identification, program operations performance, and strengthening of customer and partner relationships. He brings over 20 years of technical and management experience leading engineering-based programs with a science and satellite ground system focus. Rob brings a proven track record of managing programs that emphasize technical innovation to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Air Force, the United States Coast Guard (USCG), Department of Defense (DoD) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA).

Prior to joining ERT, Rob held technical and management positions at STi Systems, RGII Technologies, and Integral Systems (later acquired by Kratos Defense), supporting NOAA, USGS, DARPA and the Air Force. Rob started his career as a software engineer, expanding his technical expertise to include system administration and design; systems engineering; network design; virtualization and enterprise architecture roles, and, eventually, project and program management. Prior to this role, Rob served as the Deputy VP of ERT’s Science Mission Business Unit, overseeing management and performance of all of ERT’s NOAA NESDIS programs. Rob holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Virginia Darden Graduate School of Business; a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Purdue University.

Jeffrey Arnold

Chief Innovation Officer

Mr. Jeffrey Arnold has served as the Chief Scientist for Climate and Environmental Sciences for the MITRE Corporation as well as Chief Climate Scientist with the US Army Engineers, where he created and led the Climate Science for Engineering Applications national research and implementation programs. He also served as a senior scientist for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Jeff’s research and applications work in hydro-climatology has been done collaboratively across multiple US federal science and engineering agencies with the goals of reducing technical and science-policy threats to water and energy security and of enhancing infrastructure resilience by better characterizing specific climate change impacts. At the USEPA and NOAA, Jeff led surface and aloft field experiments and HPC-scale numerical modeling studies to characterize changes in atmospheric processes under projected future conditions.

Jeff reviews for journals in the atmospheric and hydrologic sciences, regularly serves on advisory panels for national climate science and applications programs, and has co-written more than 130 peer-reviewed open-literature publications. He holds a Ph.D. in tropospheric chemistry and physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Neil Jones

Vice President, Business Development


Mr. Neil Jones serves as ERT’s Vice President of Business Development, leading development and implementation of BD processes, providing oversight of business pursuits, and working with ERT’s executive team on developing corporate strategy. He provides corporate-wide BD training and mentorship, and supports capture of individual business opportunities. Mr. Jones started his career more than 20 years ago with ERT as a geophysicist performing shallow earth exploration and marine survey work. He quickly moved into management overseeing high profile projects such as the Spring Valley Formerly Used Defense Site, and complex work in remote sites in Japan, the Caribbean, Poland, and Alaska. He served as Deputy Program Manager to ERT’s Environmental Services Business Unit (now, Science and IT BU) before moving to a business development role. His scientific and management background, combined with BD know-how led to ERT’s success on the NOAALink contract, winning over $296M in task order work, more than all other contract vendors combined. He has had additional success leading pursuit of work with state agencies, multiple USACE districts, and NASA centers.

Dr. Philip Ardanuy

Chief Scientist

Dr. Philip Ardanuy is responsible for envisioning and developing services and solutions and communicating ERT’s scientific capabilities to ERT’s customers and partners. He is an acknowledged expert in science/systems engineering for meteorological and Earth system applications spanning remote sensing and satellite systems engineering through numerical weather prediction and decision support. He brings a 40-year record of applied research and systems engineering across NOAA and NASA. He has published extensively in peer-reviewed and conference literature, chaired and participated on organizing committees for US and international meteorological satellite conferences, and was a member of the writing teams for both Earth Sciences and Applications from Space (ESAS) Decadal Surveys. He also served as inaugural member of NOAA’s Environmental Information Services Working Group (EISWG) and NASA’s Earth Sciences Advisory Committee (ESAC).

Dr. Ardanuy’s leadership of the Hughes/Raytheon Visible and Infrared Imager/Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) science team led to a winning PDR and he subsequently served as Principal Investigator in the NOAA SBIR “A New Machine Learning Technique for Accurately Forecasting Extreme Precipitation from Landfalling Atmospheric Rivers: Landfalling Event Atmospheric River Neural Network (LEARN2) Prediction Tool.” As a member of the GeoXO Hyperspectral Value Assessment Team, he coauthored the Pre-Phase-A Value Assertion Report for NOAA’s geostationary hyperspectral infrared sounder (GSX), which is planned for a 2035 launch.

Phil received his Ph.D. in Meteorology from the Florida State University.

Ryan Glover

Director of Human Resources and Talent Acquisition

Mr. Ryan Glover works in conjunction with ERT’s Human Resources team and other organizational leaders to create, implement, and improve HR strategies, policies, and programs that align with the strategic goals of the organization and meet the needs of ERT’s talented workforce.

Ryan has extensive management experience, encompassing both retail operations and federal contracting, including support for multiple DoD agencies as well as NASA and NOAA. He has overseen the onboarding of contracts which have increased the size of the company by 50 percent.

Ryan holds a Master of Science in Management from the University of Maryland Global Campus and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Shepherd University. Ryan is certified as a Professional in Human Resources (PHR), a SHRM Certified Professional (SHRM-CP), and a Project Management Professional (PMP).

Katie Garrett

Vice President, Marketing


Katie joins ERT after almost nine years with award-winning branding and marketing agency REQ. Blending creative execution and data insights, Katie helps build brands with impact. She has led engagements for government contractors, PE-backed organizations, and B2G/B2B tech, including: PAE, Amentum, CSRA, GDIT, Godspeed Capital portfolio companies SilverEdge and Stratus, Akima, and others. Prior to REQ, Katie spent ten years in professional services marketing as the Director of Marketing & Communications for the nationally-renowned firm David M. Schwarz Architects.

Katie is a Past-President for the DC Chapter of the Society for Marketing Professional Services and previously served on the Boards of Directors of CREW DC, the Washington Building Congress, and Digital District. She is currently serving her second term on the Board of the Washington Architectural Foundation. Katie is a graduate of the University of Virginia.

Benita Whitfield

Director of Contracts, Procurement and Property Management

Benita Whitfield is the Director of Contracts, Procurement and Property Management. Benita has been with ERT since it was a small 8(A) firm, building the contracts department and mentoring teams of professionals inside and outside of the contracts department over the years.

Benita works with the executive team and colleagues to assist in developing company policies and procedures that align with corporate initiatives. She has extensive experience managing and administering federal contracts with agencies like NOAA, NASA, DoD, Naval Research Laboratory, US Army Corps of Engineers, Patent and Trade Office, General Services Administration; state and local contracts with agencies like Maryland State Highway Administration and various colleges and universities; as well as commercial contracts with ERT as a Prime Contractor and as a Subcontractor to other Prime Contractors; and corporate leases and license agreements.

Benita received her Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from University of Maryland Global Campus and is currently pursuing her master’s degree in Acquisition and Contract Management.

Ashley Hargro

Director, Business Development

Ashley Hargro joins ERT bringing nearly 15 years of cross-functional experience in data analytics, capture & proposal management, and project administration. Ashley believes in the power of collaboration and strives to create value not only through analytical insights but also through strong relationships and teamwork.

Ashley began her Business Development career as an analyst for ManTech International Corporation. In her role, she supported senior leadership in executing strategies that aligned business goals with long-term sustainability. She successfully standardized and implemented processes related to labor audit readiness for a $750M+ DoD contract.

With a passion for driving growth and continuous learning, Ashley expanded her analyst role into capture & proposal development as well as program management. Over the course of five years, she developed and implemented a rapid response proposal capability, submitted company proposals with a total bid evaluation of more than $500M, recognized nearly $2M in revenue as a Divisional PM, successfully obtained the Service Disabled and Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) certification through Veteran Affairs, and facilitated the merger and acquisition for a Small Business DoD firm.

Known for her strong communication and interpersonal skills, Ashley excels in building relationships with key stakeholders, clients, and colleagues. A career highlight was being nominated as Capture Manager for a winning NASA Goddard contract, generating over $100M in revenue.

Ashley holds a Master’s in Business Administration from the University of Maryland Global Campus and Bachelor of Arts in Communications, Arts, and Sciences from the Pennsylvania State University. She resides in Montgomery County, MD, and outside of work loves traveling, fitness, is a fan of the Baltimore Ravens, and was a former basketball coach and player.