Axient Appoints New Chiefs of Innovation, Corporate Affairs, and Strategy

Jay Kovacs

As Chief Innovation Officer, Mr. Kovacs will be responsible for developing and overseeing Axient’s long-term growth and innovation strategy to expand the company’s discriminating capabilities. Since 2021, Mr. Kovacs has been Senior Vice President of Growth Strategies working directly for Axient’s Chief Growth Officer, Dan Deans. As Senior Vice President of Growth Strategies, Mr. Kovacs led strategy development and technical solutioning, as well as provided subject matter expertise across the company’s top strategic pursuits. In his previous role and in his new role, he leads innovations and solutioning for strategic technical capabilities across Axient, including Axient’s Digital Engineering and Data Analytics practices. Mr. Kovacs has over 35 years of experience in technical leadership roles at KBR, former SGT, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric.

Patience Samson

As Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, Ms. Samson will navigate and balance the internal and external needs of the business and build relationships to market and advocate for Axient capabilities, contracts, employees, and business interests. Ms. Samson will align the responsibilities of corporate communications, government relations and public affairs, stakeholder engagement, and community relations and ensure Axient’s vision, mission, and strategy are aligned, communicated, and executed internally and externally across all platforms and audiences. As CCAO, Ms. Samson will oversee strategic communications (public relations, marketing, public/government affairs), corporate responsibility and community relations, employee engagement and internal communications, M&A integration, change management, and quality/continuous improvement. Ms. Samson has 20 years of experience in the defense, civilian, and intelligence markets in program management, corporate operations, and business development/marketing roles.

Porf Dubón

As Chief of Strategy, Porf Dubón will be responsible for providing a corporate level focus on developing, communicating, and realizing strategy. He will support the CEO and collaborate with the executive team to execute key corporate initiatives to enable growth throughout the organization. Mr. Dubón has 38 years of comprehensive hands-on experience in operations, management, training, education, decision-making, strategic planning, directing, evaluating, motivating and quality improvement, including 20 years in the U.S. Air Force. He has provided executive level technical and programmatic support for multiple DoD programs and has overseen the integration of risk, reliability, safety, quality, engineering, and software assurance specialties into the system engineering lifecycles of space and missile systems development and testing, launch support and launch vehicle system development activities.