Bruce R. Orvis

Bruce R. Orvis is a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation and member of the Pardee RAND Graduate School faculty. From 2001 to 2011, he directed the Manpower and Training Program in the RAND Army Research Division and was associate director from 1991 to 2000.

Orvis’s research covers a broad range of national defense issues. They include assessment of future military and civilian personnel requirements, supply, and the implications for Army recruiting, marketing, and personnel policies; the relationship among soldier characteristics, training, and performance; optimization of recruiting resource mix and levels; workforce capability and productivity; military personnel structures and costs; officer commission production, considering diversity, ROTC staffing and scholarship policy, and economic conditions; national testing of military recruiting initiatives; direction and analysis of national surveys of youth and their parents concerning military service; peacetime and wartime military deployments, including deployability, effects on soldiers and their families, and implications for retention, term length, and recruiting flows; personnel stabilization to increase job qualification rates in the Army RC; integration of manpower, personnel, and training issues into the acquisition of weapon and support systems; servicemember substance abuse; and defense institution-capacity building.

Orvis served as a special consultant to the National Academy of Sciences on military recruiting and on the Scientific Review Panel for the Army’s 21st century soldier requirements study. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and A.B. with distinction in psychology from the University of Rochester, where he was selected to Phi Beta Kappa.