COL James J. Raftery, Jr.

COL Jim Raftery is assigned to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, as Professor and Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. 

COL Raftery graduated as a Distinguished Military Graduate from Washington University in St. Louis in 1988 with a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and was commissioned as a 2LT in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He commanded the 261st Signal Company in Hanau, Germany. After completing a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Missouri-Columbia, he entered the Army Acquisition Corps, where he served for fifteen years. His final Acquisition Corps assignment was Product Manager for Information Warfare at Ft. Meade, Maryland, from 2007-2010. He completed a one-year operational assignment with the Cyber National Mission Force at Ft. Meade in 2016. 

COL Raftery earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005 and a Master of Strategic Studies from the US Army War College in 2011. 

As a faculty member at West Point, he has served in a variety of roles, including Photonics Research Center Director and Director of the Dean’s staff as the Principal Associate Dean. He is DAWIA Level III certified in both the Program Manager and the Science and Technology Manager career fields. He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a member of the American Society for Engineering Education, the electrical engineering honor society Eta Kappa Nu, and the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi. 

He and his wife Linda have two adult children: Jeremy, who served as an Infantry NCO in the 82d Airborne Division, and Erin, who is an electrical engineering PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.