For students and mentees
Approximately 500 students mentored, through programs built on one premise: judge the work, not the pedigree.
Every program on this page starts from the same conviction — that a demonstrated output is harder to inherit than a proxy. Scaffold people so they can do real work inside the established system, then let the demonstration decide. Including the right people means finding them first — and judging that accurately means seeing the work.
You do not need to arrive knowing all of this. No one carries every tool; this is team work, and what you already bring is the place you start.
The programs
CIRCUIT
Cohort-based Integrated Research Community for Undergraduate Innovation and Trailblazing — six cycles at APL from 2017 to 2023, built for students from trailblazing backgrounds: first-generation, low-income, and those with limited prior access to research. Cohorts contributed to reconstructions published in Nature.
Eight pillars structure the model:
- Holistic recruiting that does not screen on credentials a trailblazer's background would not have generated
- Mission engagement, so trainees see why the technical skill they are acquiring matters
- Targeted training built around the project's immediate needs
- Leadership development
- Integrated assessment — learning and confidence run through feedback loops per module, not a summative pass/fail
- Diverse mentorship
- Academic partnerships that route the cohort across institutions
- Career empowerment that sustains capability beyond the program
MERIT and COMPASS
MERIT — Mentoring Exceptional Researchers to Innovate and Thrive — generalizes the CIRCUIT model into a structured, scalable research training framework. COMPASS is the layer of targeted mentor interventions that operates MERIT inside a specific institution, designed to help students surface the tacit and explicit knowledge gaps that make up the hidden curriculum of research practice. Both are documented as JHU/APL whitepapers and program documentation; CIRCUIT is the one with a peer-reviewed program description.
PISTA
Perceptual Inference System for Tactical Agentic AI — a ten-week summer incubator sponsored by DTRA JSTO in 2025. Nine student fellows shipped a working CBRNE decision-support prototype to agency leadership, through three full redesigns.
College Prep Program at APL
An all-volunteer summer program he co-founded in 2009 and still co-directs, supporting underserved students through academics, applications, essays, and financial aid, with longitudinal support afterward. More than 90% of participants go on track for four-year degrees, on 500+ volunteer hours a year.
LENS
Learning Engineering for Next-Generation Systems is a concentration within the Johns Hopkins M.Ed. in Learning Design and Technology — a 10-course, 30-credit online degree — the program directed by James Diamond at the School of Education. Gray-Roncal leads the concentration's development.
It welcomes two audiences equally: education and training professionals moving toward systems practice, and engineers and technical professionals moving toward learning design. Five competencies anchor it — systems analysis, iterative development, human–system collaboration, test and evaluation, and navigating sociotechnical constraints — and the capstone runs against a real operational problem.
Working together
If you are a student interested in connectomics, machine learning at scale, or how people build capability in high-consequence settings, get in touch at wgr@jhu.edu. Say what you have built or tried, and what you want to learn next — that is more useful than a transcript.