Dr. David A. Bray began work in public service at age 15 at a 4 GeV high-energy electron beam accelerator facility, later serving in the private sector before returning as IT Chief for the CDC’s Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program during 9/11, SARS, monkeypox, and other outbreaks. He volunteered to deploy to Afghanistan to “think differently” on military and humanitarian issues in 2009. In 2013, he served as the Executive Director for the bipartisan National Commission for the Review of the Research and Development Programs of the U.S. Intelligence Community. He holds a PhD from Emory University’s business school and two post-docs from MIT and Harvard focused on collective intelligence and improving organizational resilience in turbulent environments. He has received both the Arthur S. Flemming Award and Roger W. Jones Award for Executive Leadership in addition to the National Intelligence Exceptional Achievement Medal.
Dr. Bray currently is a Eisenhower Fellow to Taiwan and Australia and Chief Information Officer for the Federal Communications Commission and through the efforts of a team of positive “change agents” he led the transformation of the FCC’s legacy IT to award-winning tech in less than two years. This included rolling-out new cloud-based IT that achieved results in 1/2 the time at 1/6 the cost. He was selected to be an Eisenhower Fellow to Taiwan and Australia focused on the impacts of the Internet and Everything and the recipient of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronic Association’s Outstanding Achievement Award for Civilian Government in 2015. He was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2016. He presently serves as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, as a Visiting Associate at the University of Oxford, and as a Visiting Executive at Harvard University focused on issues of transformational leadership and the intersection of technology breakthroughs on foreign policies.