Randy Soper attended Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering on a National Merit Scholarship and was an officer of Tau Beta Pi during his studies. He is a member of Mechanical Engineering class of 1994 as a BSME, in honors, summa cum laude, with a minor in Economics. He continued to study in Blacksburg graduating MSME in 1995 and received the Paul E. Torgersen Research Excellence Award for his Master’s thesis on mechanism synthesis. Randy returned to study and conduct research at Virginia Tech in Computer Science as part of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics in 2017-2018 under a full-time study fellowship of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Randy’s career includes modeling and simulation analysis in academia, heavy industry, and for U.S. national security and civilian federal government. Randy is an expert in enterprise scale deployments of Artificial Intelligence including strategy, architecture, governance, security, and human factors. Randy was the Chief of Artificial for the U.S. Internal Revenue Agency from 2022 through 2025. He was the lead consultant on the Department of Justice's first AI strategy, and a key contributor to the U.S. Intelligence Community's inaugural responsible AI standards. He is a recognized thought leader in enterprise-scale and trustworthy AI implementation, with focuses on human–machine teaming and AI assurance. He is actively involved in shaping the future of AI through his volunteer work with the IEEE where he has supported a number of AI standards and ethics working groups and currently serves as an officer of the global IEEE AI Standards Committee. He has also contributed as a member of the NIST Generative AI Public Working Group and as an advisor to MITRE's ATLAS framework for AI security and incident response. Randy’s work emphasizes scalable, ethical, and reliable AI solutions for complex systems.