Dr. David Bray

Dr. David A. Bray is a distinguished fellow and chair of the Accelerator for the Alfred Lee Loomis Innovation Council at the nonpartisan Henry L. Stimson Center. He is also a nonresident distinguished fellow with Business Executives for National Security and a CEO and transformation leader for several “under the radar” tech and data ventures seeking to get started in novel situations.

Dr. Bray is principal at LeadDoAdapt Ventures and has served in a variety of leadership roles in turbulent environments, including work on bioterrorism preparedness and response from 2000 to 2005. He previously served as executive director for a bipartisan national commission on R&D, provided nonpartisan leadership as a federal agency senior executive, worked with the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps on improving organizational adaptability, and aided U.S. Special Operations Command’s J5 directorate on the challenges of countering disinformation online.

Dr. Bray has received both the Joint Civilian Service Commendation Award and the National Intelligence Exceptional Achievement Medal. He accepted a leadership role in December 2019 to direct the bipartisan Commission on the Geopolitical Impacts of New Technologies and Data that included Sen. Mark Warner, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. Suzan DelBene and Rep. Michael McCaul. From 2017 to early 2020, Dr. Bray served as executive director for the People-Centered Internet coalition, chaired by internet co‑originator Vint Cerf, and he was named a senior fellow at the Institute for Human-Machine Cognition in 2018. Business Insider named Dr. Bray one of the top “24 Americans Who Are Changing the World” under 40, and the World Economic Forum named Dr. Bray a Young Global Leader. For 12 different startups, Dr. Bray has served as president, CEO, chief strategy officer and strategic adviser.

Dr. Bray’s passions include complicated, near-impossible missions that bring humans and technology together in challenging circumstances. Through the efforts of a team of “positive change agents,” Dr. Bray led the transformation of the Federal Communications Commission’s legacy IT, modernizing more than 207 systems into award-winning technology. That transformation included rolling out new cloud-based IT that achieved results in half the time at one-sixth the cost.

Dr. Bray received the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s Outstanding Achievement Award for Civilian Government and the Global CIO 100 Award twice, in 2015 and 2017, honors typically given to private-sector Fortune 500 organizations, for transformational leadership in change-adverse settings. From 2017 to 2021, he worked with multiple services associated with the U.S. Department of Defense on improving organizational adaptability and countering disinformation online, including personally surviving a disinformation attack in 2018. In 2019, Dr. Bray delivered the AI World Society Distinguished Lecture to the United Nations on U.N. Charter Day. In 2025, he served as an expert witness before a public congressional hearing on AI, providing verbal and written testimony and answering questions from members of the U.S. Congress to help inform AI policy.

As principal at LeadDoAdapt Ventures, Dr. Bray provides board-level and CEO-level leadership to “under the radar” tech and data ventures that seek to begin operations in novel situations, offering strategic direction and advice on topics that shape the future of data, bio and space. He provides leadership to organizations confronting turbulent environments on topics ranging from quantum computing to commercial space endeavors, and from synthetic biology to data cooperatives paired with artificial intelligence.

Dr. Bray served as co-chair in 2016 and 2017 of an IEEE committee focused on artificial intelligence, automated systems and innovative policies globally, and he has been a visiting executive in residence at Harvard University since 2015 and a faculty member giving talks on impact and disruption at Singularity University since 2017. In 2021 and 2022, Dr. Bray was named a distinguished fellow with the Atlantic Council. In 2023, Dr. Bray was named an academy fellow with the National Academy of Public Administration focused on the role of transformative technologies, like AI, in public service. In 2022, Business Executives for National Security welcomed Dr. Bray as a distinguished fellow focused on the intersection of transformative technologies, global collaborations and over-the-horizon challenges. He has been an invited keynote speaker to CEOs, world leaders and audiences of more than 3,000 at events in India, Vietnam, Australia, Taiwan, Dubai, South Africa, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Canada, Belgium, Sweden, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.