Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson attends the "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" screening event at the Paley Center for Media on June 4, 2014, in New York City. He is among a batch of new members on Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s Defense Innovation Advisory Board.(Photo: Cindy Ord)
WASHINGTON — Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Amazon head Jeff Bezos and former Obama administration official Cass Sunstein are among the newest names to join Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s new Defense Innovation Advisory Board.
Carter announced those names as part of a list of ten new members for the board, which he created in March to advise the Pentagon on technology innovation issues. The board is headed by Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, the Google parent company.
The board, Carter said in his speech, is “charged with keeping DoD imbued with a culture of innovation in people, organizations, operations, and technology, to support people who innovate, those creative figures in our department who are willing to try new things, fail fast, and iterate; and also to ensure that we’re always doing everything we can to stay ahead of potential adversaries.”
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Carter Names Three to Innovation Board
The board now includes the following members:
Hoffman, Isaacson and McRaven had all previously been announced as members of the board.
But the biggest names are Tyson, arguably the face of popular science around the world today, and Bezos, the Amazon founder who also owns The Washington Post. Bezos is also the head of Blue Origin, a space launch company working with the United Launch Alliance to develop a new engine for military launch.
Although not as flashy a name as some of the others, the inclusion of McQuade is notable, as United Technologies is the only legacy defense contractor involved in the board.
The board will work over the summer before providing initial recommendations to Carter by October.
Twitter: @AaronMehta
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