Profile: David Bray, FCC CIO

David Bray serves as chief information officer of the Federal Communications Commission, where he oversees the agency’s information technology modernization efforts.

Bray is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, has been an Eisenhower Fellow to Taiwan and Australia since 2004 and a visiting executive at Harvard University since 2015.

As an Eisenhower Fellow, Bray took part in a five-week program in 2015 to meet with industry and government leaders in Australia and Taiwan to discuss the “internet of everything.”

“From my conversations with leaders in both Taiwan and Australia, we’ll need to think differently about how we approach security and privacy for the Internet of Everything, and understand regular and abnormal ‘herd behaviors’ across a massive amount of online devices,” Bray told Carla Rudder of the Red Hat-backed The Enterprisers Project in an interview.

Bray said he thinks a “cyber public health approach,” which he said could be a combination of cyber personal hygiene and cyber epidemiology, could help secure the “internet of things.”

He spent three years at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as an executive director with the National Commission for the assessment of the Intelligence Community’s research and development programs and as a senior national intelligence service executive.

He held senior IT roles at federal agencies such as IT chief for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program and system developer and project manager for international monitoring and emergency response solutions at the Energy Department.

He is a former lead application developer for prototype satellite applications at the Institute for Defense Analyses from 1995 through 1998.

Bray also worked as a project manager and senior systems developer at a Microsoft partner firm Intellinet and Yahoo for two years.

He earned a PhD degree from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School and served as a post-doctoral associate at Harvard and MIT in 2008.

Bray received the 2015 Outstanding Achievement Award for Civilian Government from the Armed Forces Communications and Electronic Association and was named Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum for 2016-2021.