Who Is JANUS' Dr. Karl Pfeiffer?
10/06/2025
JANUS Assistant Vice President Karl Pfeiffer, Ph.D. is an Air Force veteran with a passion for atmospheric science, numerical modeling, and creating technological solutions that advance space training and simulation practices.
Karl grew up on U.S. Air Force bases, though he always called Pensacola, Fla., home. He worked as a mainframe computer operator while attending the University of West Florida, finding early the intersection of physical sciences and computer science. He graduated in 1988 with a degree in physics and a desire to see the world as an Air Force officer.
Although he sought a computer systems career, the needs of the Air Force said: weather officer. His background in math and physics sealed his fate and put him on a 21-year journey learning to better communicate science to strategic analysts, mission planners, and warfighters, conveying mission-critical information in English and through software tools.
Early in his weather career, he was sent for a computer science degree at the Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson AFB. Karl graduated in 1994 with a thesis modeling the fate of jettisoned aviation fuel for the Air Force Environics Directorate. As part of this work, he fondly recalled, he installed Linux version 0.99pl5 from about 40 3.5-inch disks. "That's how we did it back in the day," he joked.
In 1998, he briefly considered leaving the Air Force to take up civilian work addressing Year 2000 (Y2K) issues, though the Air Force offered yet another golden opportunity, a Ph.D. slot at North Carolina State University. Karl graduated in August 2001 with a dissertation examining early precursors to explosive extratropical storms using advanced numerical modeling techniques. He reported in to the Air Force Combat Climatology Center in September 2001, applying a career of atmospheric and data science to help develop early climate assessments of Afghanistan, and in preparing decision support tools for advanced reconnaissance and communication systems.
He served a year-long deployment as the Chief of the Weather Cell, Combined Air Operations Center, Al Udeid AB, Qatar, from August 2003 to 2004. Following deployment, Karl finished his Air Force career in Monterey, Calif., as a military professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in both the Information Sciences and Meteorology departments. "The job of an instructor isn't to be smart," he said, "but to help the students find the smart person in themselves."
After transitioning from the Air Force, Karl landed at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, which was acquired by JANUS in 2024. He is focused on transforming knowledge of the natural environment into opportunities, helping the warfighter move beyond coping with the weather to exploiting the natural environment for asymmetric advantage. "With older systems, it's harder to exploit the weather," Karl says, "but it's easier now to find that gap and use it for all its worth." His work has brought him into the JANUS research creating the Space Weather for Training and Simulation (SWFTS) tool that can revolutionize training and simulation capabilities for today's warfighters.
Karl will be attending the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Fla., December 1–4, 2025. Stop by the JANUS booth, Booth #1184, to meet Karl and learn more about how JANUS is building solutions to optimize space training.
