CSIS Names Matt Pearl as Director of Strategic Technologies Program

Former NSC Director for Emerging Technologies to lead CSIS research on critical technology competition and innovation

WASHINGTON, DC – January 21, 2025 – The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) today announced Matt Pearl has been named director of the CSIS Strategic Technologies Program. Pearl brings to CSIS extensive experience working at the intersection of technology and national security policy, having served most recently as director for emerging technologies and special advisor to the deputy national security advisor at the National Security Council.

“Modern economic security policy requires a deep understanding of advanced technologies, markets and market players, and geopolitics. It also requires real-world experience of how policy is made and executed. Matt Pearl has these in spades across a number of technology domains shaping national security. We are excited to count him as one of our senior scholars,” said Navin Girishankar, president of the CSIS Economic Security and Technology Department. “Matt is the right person to take over from Jim Lewis as director of the Strategic Technologies Program. It is hard to find words to capture Jim’s contributions to CSIS and to our country over the past several decades. We are fortunate that Jim will continue to serve as an affiliate of CSIS and a member of our community."

As director of the Strategic Technologies Program, Pearl will build on CSIS’s long track record on technology policy and its role in national security in areas such as digital governance (including cybersecurity, privacy, and surveillance); digital infrastructure (including data centers and telecommunications networks); and emerging areas such as space commerce, digital assets and decentralized finance, and quantum and other forms of unconventional computing. Advancing innovative solutions in these areas of study is core to the mission of the newly established CSIS Economic Security and Technology Department, which examines the most pressing issues facing the United States and its partners in sustaining economic and technological advantages essential to prosperity, security, and resilience.

In his previous position at the National Security Council, Pearl led numerous initiatives, including the National Spectrum Strategy, the Presidential Memorandum on Spectrum, the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark, the International Joint Statement Endorsing Principles for 6G, and cloud and telecommunications partnerships between the United States and other countries.

Prior to joining the National Security Council, Pearl was an associate bureau chief at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), where he was responsible for managing wireless policy and oversaw many of the largest spectrum transitions and auctions in history. Before joining the FCC, he held clerkships with Judge Harris Hartz of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and Judge Lawrence Kahn of the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York. Pearl earned his JD at Yale Law School, where he served as a submissions editor for the Yale Journal on Regulation.

“I’m honored to join the CSIS Economic Security and Technology Department as the director of the Strategic Technologies Program. The United States faces technological competition in numerous critical and emerging technologies, including cloud and edge computing, telecom, cybersecurity, quantum, and other advanced tech. I look forward to advancing CSIS’s goal of providing rigorous analysis and actionable recommendations to ensure that the U.S. achieves a leadership position in all of those domains,” said Pearl.

The CSIS Economic Security and Technology Department provides strategic insights and practical solutions to drive competitiveness, technology leadership, and economic security amid global threats through its unique breadth and depth of expertise across economic policy, global markets, and advanced technologies. Visit here to learn more about the department.

For media inquiries, please contact Andrew Schwartz (aschwartz@csis.org) and Sam Cestari (scestari@csis.org).

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is a bipartisan, nonprofit policy research organization dedicated to advancing practical ideas to address the world’s greatest challenges.