Desourdis Collaboration, LLC, President and CEO, A Business-Development Consulting Company

Robert Irving Desourdis is an engineer, with degrees from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and MIT. He has spent his 40-year career in post-nuclear-attack and public safety radio communications, currently working to expand the role of public media in direct support of homeland security communications. Throughout his life, he has had an intense interest in American history, launched by his father of the same name building models for him as a child. He has created/co-authored 15 books, including the three books on the Italian Campaign from the Frank de Planta tour he took with South Mountain Expeditions in 2014. After this tour, he realized the extensive video he captured could be used to transcribe the guide’s words and capture many still images from the video to create an immersive book series on his tour experience. Bob also builds models he includes in dioramas for donation to WWII veterans and others, including the B-25B for the family of a Doolittle Raider, a C-47 “Texas Gal” that towed the 82nd Airborne into France on D-Day, and Barney Nolan’s B-24H and B-17G he flew in the 8th Air Force (subject of another NOVA book). Bob now lives in Olympia, Washington.