Joshua Marcuse (born March 1982) is an American technology executive, former defense innovation leader, and non-profit board member. He served as the first Executive Director of the United States

Defense Innovation Board The Defense Innovation Board is an advisory board set up in August 2016 to provide "independent recommendations to the United States United States Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Defense and other senior DoD leaders on emerging technologies a ...

and founded the nonprofits

Young Professionals in Foreign Policy Young Professionals in Foreign Policy (YPFP) is a United States nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to train the next generation of foreign policy leadership. The group was founded by Joshua Marcuse in 2004. Membership YPFP's members ...

(YPFP), Globally, and the Federal Innovator Network.

Early Career

Marcuse moved to Washington, DC in the years after the

September 11, 2001 attacks The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...

. He worked as a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations followed by roles at Booz Allen Hamilton in public sector consulting. In 2004, Marcuse started holding ad-hoc meetings with recent college graduates to talk about

foreign policy Foreign policy, also known as external policy, is the set of strategies and actions a State (polity), state employs in its interactions with other states, unions, and international entities. It encompasses a wide range of objectives, includ ...

and

global affairs Global studies (GS) or global affairs (GA) is the interdisciplinary study of global macro-processes. Predominant subjects are political science in the form of global politics, as well as economics, law, the sociology of law, ecology, environmental ...

. Within 4 months, his email list grew to over 500 people. He subsequently started a nonprofit that became the

. Over the next 8 years, the group grew to about 10,000 people in 75 countries and hosted events featuring policymakers in the United States and other nations.

Government Service

In 2012, Marcuse took on a role at the

Pentagon In geometry, a pentagon () is any five-sided polygon or 5-gon. The sum of the internal angles in a simple polygon, simple pentagon is 540°. A pentagon may be simple or list of self-intersecting polygons, self-intersecting. A self-intersecting ...

as senior adviser for policy innovation in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. In this position, he worked on policy innovation, leadership development, and organizational change. . In 2016,

Defense Secretary The United States secretary of defense (acronym: SecDef) is the head of the United States Department of Defense (DoD), the executive department of the U.S. Armed Forces, and is a high-ranking member of the federal cabinet. DoDD 5100.1: Enclosu ...

Ash Carter Ashton Baldwin Carter (September 24, 1954 – October 24, 2022) was an American government official and academic who served as the 25th United States secretary of defense from February 2015 to January 2017. He later served as director of the B ...

established the Defense Innovation Board to bring commercial solutions into the DoD. Marcuse was named as its inaugural Executive Director, proceeding over the stand-up of the Board and its initial research publications on how to modernize the DOD. In 2019, Marcuse led the effort to publish AI ethics principles for defense uses, which was published by the Defense Innovation Board prior to the

generative AI Generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI, GenAI, or GAI) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, or other forms of data. These models learn the underlying patterns and str ...

boom. In 2020, Marcuse left the Department of Defense for a role at

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

. In 2024, he was named a DC Tech Titan by the '' Washingtonian'' magazine.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Marcuse, Joshua Living people Dartmouth College alumni Obama administration personnel 1982 births Businesspeople from Manhattan United States Department of Defense officials