Emil Michael

Emil Michael serves as the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and Chief Technology Officer for the Department of Defense, overseeing the department's research, development, and prototyping enterprise including DARPA and the Missile Defense Agency. He is a former Chief Business Officer at Uber, where he drove global partnerships and capital-raising initiatives, and has invested in companies spanning AI, quantum computing, and consumer logistics. He is best known for his efforts to bring private-sector innovation practices into the Pentagon and foster new defense technology companies to compete with traditional defense primes.