Gary Klein, Ph.D., is a Senior Scientist at MacroCognition LLC. He was instrumental in founding the field of Naturalistic Decision Making. Dr. Klein received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969. He spent the first phase of his career in academia as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Oakland University (1970-1974).  The second phase was spent working for the government as a research psychologist for the U.S. Air Force (1974-1978). The third phase began in 19878 when he founded his own R&D company, Klein Associates, which grew to 37 people by the time it was acquired by Applied Research Associates (ARA) in 2005.

Dr. Klein developed a Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model in 1985 to describe how people actually make decisions in natural settings. This research was subsequently incorporated in Army doctrine for command and control.  He presented a PreMortem method of risk assessment in 1998.  In 2007 he developed a naturalistic model of sensemaking, the Data/Frame model. In 2009 he presented a Management by Discovery account of how people plan when faced with ill-defined goals.  He described a multi-path model of insight in 2011.  He is a Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

He has written: Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (1998); The Power of Intuition (2004); Working Minds: A practitioner’s guide to Cognitive Task Analysis (Crandall, Klein, & Hoffman, 2006); and Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the keys to adaptive decision making (2009)