Michelle: You had a very interesting career with many different aspects of it. You were in the army, and then grad school, and a professor. Could you just walk us through how you got started?

Marcel: Well, it was certainly not a linear track. I enlisted in the Army National Guard at the ripe old age of 17 years old. And so, when my friends were walking down for graduation, I was already at, what was at the time, Fort Benning, Georgia.

I did my first in college, I was not successful by the way. And then did my initial three years in the military. I was infantry. For those of you who are familiar, I was a dragon gunner. I was a missile, I blew up tanks. Certainly nothing had prepared me for the field of quality. And so I dropped out of school with a retail manager trainer for a number of years, decided to go back.

I got my undergrad degree from the University of Pittsburgh, which is number one in the world for philosophy, which is what I got my degree in. I realized quickly I was not going to pay off my student loans with a degree in philosophy. So went and studied Chinese and Japanese religious traditions within graduate work. That's not going to pay for my student loans either. Ultimately went and got my MBA.

I started a few businesses up, got re-enlisted in the military in the National Guard with the intent to get commissioned as a military intelligence officer, got commissioned as an intel officer and was with the Mechanized Infantry Battalion, got involuntarily mobilized. I was called on a Friday and told to report the next day for an all-expense paid vacation to Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was a very interesting deployment for me.

I came back, I didn't know what I was gonna do. And my mentor said, get your PhD. And I said, sounds like a good thing to do. I got my PhD in strategy with a minor in artificial intelligence because, at the time, my program still required a minor. And kind of the rest is history. I wound up getting into Robert Morse University, which is where I'm at now. I've been there for...I think I'm going on my 18th year, give or take a few.

And it's afforded me a lot of opportunities. Of course, a lot of what we do in strategy and AI is statistical analysis, which lends itself very well for the world of quality.