James Cantor
Chief of Performance Excellence and Strategic Partnerships
Dr. James Cantor is the Chief of Performance Excellence and Strategic Partnerships, where he oversees strategic sourcing, execution and mission assurance, and enterprise risk. He most recently served as Chief Technology Officer.
Cantor joined the company in 1990 as a project manager and worked on several high-profile programs before entering line management as a division manager, operations manager, and deputy group president. In 2014, Dr. Cantor became the National Security Sector Chief Engineer and Leidos Technical Director for Program Execution. In 2016 he assumed these responsibilities for the entire enterprise as Leidos’ Corporate Engineering Executive. As part of this role, Cantor focused on the technical and execution risk of Leidos’ most critical programs and supported all elements of the CTO organization including the developing our technology strategy, maturing our technical core competencies, and fostering our technical human capital.
Cantor has more than 35 years of experience in program development, system engineering, statistical methods, sensors, signal processing, estimation and detection methodology, simulation system development, and simulation and information technology development, primarily for national security applications. Prior to joining Leidos, Cantor was a principal engineer for Computational Engineering, Inc. He also worked for the Naval Research Laboratory and the Department of Army Ballistic Missile Defense Program Office.
Cantor earned a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and a Master of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park where he serves on the A. James Clark School of Engineering Board of Visitors and Advisory Board for the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He received his Ph.D. in mathematical statistics with an emphasis on time series analysis from George Washington University.