Technology Policy Accelerator

Amy Zegart

Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow

Amy Zegart is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She is also a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The author of five books, she specializes in U.S. intelligence, emerging technologies and national security, grand strategy, and global political risk management.

Zegart's award-winning research includes the leading academic study of intelligence failures before 9/11: Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton, 2007). Her most recent book is the bestseller Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton, 2022), which was nominated by Princeton University Press for the Pulitzer Prize. She also coauthored Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity, with Condoleezza Rice (Twelve, 2018) and coedited Bytes, Bombs, and Spies: The Strategic Dimensions of Offensive Cyber Operations with Herbert Lin (Brookings, 2019). Her op-eds and essays have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Politico, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

Zegart has advised senior officials about intelligence and foreign policy for more than two decades. She served on the National Security Council staff and as a presidential campaign foreign policy advisor and has testified before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

In addition to conducting research and teaching, she led Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, founded the Stanford Cyber Policy Program, and served as chief academic officer of the Hoover Institution. Before coming to Stanford, she was professor of public policy at UCLA and a McKinsey & Company consultant.

She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, the American Political Science Association’s Leonard D. White Dissertation Prize, and research grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Hewlett Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Zegart received an AB in East Asian studies, magna cum laude, from Harvard and an MA and a PhD in political science from Stanford. She serves on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, and the American Funds/Capital Group.

Martin Giles

Hoover Policy Fellow

Martin Giles is the assistant director of Hoover’s Technology Policy Accelerator, which focuses on policy issues affecting key emerging technologies—including AI, biotechnology, robotics, semiconductors, and space—and produces The Stanford Emerging Technology Review. He is also a policy fellow at Hoover working on issues related to the financing of frontier tech.

Giles was a senior editor at The Economist for twenty-five years. serving from London as its finance and economics editor and then moving to the business side of the company, where he was responsible for its global conference operations, its peer groups for senior executives, and several other publications owned by The Economist, including Roll Call in Washington, DC, which is focused on news related to Congress.

Giles also acquired multiple businesses and launched several new ones, including a publication for finance executives across Europe that won an award for British export achievement from Queen Elizabeth II and former prime minister Tony Blair.

On returning to The Economist’s editorial team, Giles led the paper’s coverage of Silicon Valley for over five years, writing editorials and special reports on cybersecurity, mobile computing, big tech and antitrust, and a range of other tech policy issues.

He subsequently became a partner at a venture capital firm investing in early-stage enterprise technology and then served as the San Francisco bureau chief of MIT Technology Review, where his writing focused on quantum science, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. Most recently, he was the first editorial director of In-Q-Tel, which invests in emerging technologies on behalf of the US national security community.

Giles received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University and an executive MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth Graduate School of Business.

Dan Berkenstock

Distinguished Research Fellow

Dan Berkenstock is a distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His work aims to ensure sustained American aerospace leadership well into the twenty-first century and provides space-related scholarship and policy recommendations through Hoover's Technology Policy Accelerator. From 2008 to 2017, Berkenstock was the founding chief executive officer, later chief product officer, of Skybox Imaging.

In his policy research, Dan focuses on the critical advancements needed to reduce the risk of conflict in space during a forthcoming period of rapid expansion. His technical research focuses on expanding convex and polynomial optimization techniques to identify globally optimal vehicle designs in aerodynamic shape optimization problems, with a focus on low-observability hypersonic vehicles.

At Skybox, he oversaw the fundraising of more than $100 million in venture capital, helped reset the benchmark for performance in the optical, small satellite arena, and led the company through a $500 million acquisition by Google. The twenty-one Skybox satellites continue to operate as the world’s largest high-resolution commercial imaging constellation, providing timely imagery of major conflicts that is often featured in major media outlets and imagery used daily by defense and intelligence customers.

For his work at Skybox, Dan was recognized as Via Satellite magazine’s Satellite Executive of the Year in 2014 and was named to MIT Technology Review’s “Innovators under 35” in 2011. He continues to engage with the space start-up community by serving as an independent director on several boards of venture-backed aerospace start-ups and teaching aerospace entrepreneurship in the Stanford School of Engineering.

Dan completed his PhD in aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University, where he also received a master of science. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor of science in aerospace engineering. During this time, he completed four tours as a cooperative education student at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

Simone D’Amico

Research Fellow/Science Fellow

Simone D’Amico, science fellow at the Hoover Institution, is associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics (AA), the W. M. Keck Faculty Scholar in the School of Engineering, and professor of geophysics (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is the founding director of the Stanford Space Rendezvous Laboratory, codirector of the Center for Aerospace Autonomy Research (CAESAR), and director of the undergraduate program in aerospace engineering at Stanford.

Dr. D’Amico has more than twenty years of years of experience in research and development of autonomous spacecraft and distributed space systems, including multiagent architectures. He developed the distributed guidance, navigation, and control systems of several such missions and is currently the institutional principal investigator of three autonomous satellite swarms funded by NASA (Starling, currently operational in orbit) and the National Science Foundation (VISORS, SWARM-EX).

Outside of academia, D’Amico is on the advisory boards of four space start-ups focusing on distributed space systems for future applications in SAR (aynthetic aperture radar) remote sensing, orbital lifetime prolongation, and space-based solar power.

Before joining Stanford, D’Amico was research scientist and team leader at the German Aerospace Center. He is the recipient of several awards, including the 2024 NASA Ames Honor Award (for Starling); awards for best paper at conferences of the International Astronautical Federation (2022), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE, 2021), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2021), and the American Astronomical Society (2019); the IEEE M. Barry Carlton Award; the Leonardo 500 Award by the Leonardo da Vinci Society / Italian Scientists and Scholars In North America Foundation (2019); the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale / National Aeronautic Association Group Diploma of Honor (2018); the German Aerospace Center’s Sabbatical/Forschungssemester (2012) and Wissenschaft Preis (2006); and NASA’s Group Achievement Award (for GRACE mission, 2004). He holds BS and MS degrees from Politecnico di Milano (2003) and a PhD from Delft University of Technology (2010).

Drew Endy

Science Fellow/Senior Fellow (courtesy)

Drew Endy is a science fellow and senior fellow (courtesy) at the Hoover Institution. He leads Hoover’s Bio-Strategy and Leadership effort, which focuses on keeping increasingly biotic futures secure, flourishing, and democratic. Professor Endy also researches and teaches bioengineering at Stanford University, where he is the Martin Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, senior fellow (courtesy) of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and faculty codirector of degree programs for the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.

Professor Endy helped launch new undergraduate majors in bioengineering at both MIT and Stanford and the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, which involves thousands of students annually. Endy has served on the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity; the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Science, Technology, and Law; the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Synthetic Biology Task Force; and, briefly, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. He currently serves on the World Health Organization’s Advisory Committee on Variola Virus Research; the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Global Forum on Technology’s synthetic biology task force; and the Defense Science Board’s Emerging Biotechnology and National Security Task Force. Endy earned his PhD from Dartmouth in biotechnology and biochemical engineering and has been recognized in Esquire magazine as one of the seventy-five most influential people of the twenty-first century.

Norbert Holtkamp

Science Fellow

Norbert Holtkamp is a Science Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Holtkamp is also a professor of particle physics and astrophysics and of photon science at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University

At Stanford, he was SLAC’s deputy laboratory director from 2014 to 2022, leading the conception and implementation of multilaboratory partnerships for several Department of Energy and National Science Foundation projects. Since 2019 he has led SLAC’s $1.1 billion LCLS-II Free Electron Laser construction project, built by five US national laboratories. He also managed the laboratory’s overall risk portfolio, which included more than $2.5 billion worth of construction on the SLAC site. He first joined SLAC in 2010 as the associate laboratory director for the accelerator directorate.

In 2006, he was nominated principal deputy director of ITER, an international organization founded in France with seven members—the European Union (through Euratom), China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United States—collaborating on a 20-billion-Euro project to build the world's largest tokamak, a magnetic fusion devise. From 2001 to 2006, Holtkamp served as the director of the Accelerator Systems Division for the $1.4 billion Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the world’s most powerful pulsed neutron source, built by a collaboration of six Department of Energy national laboratories. He held various leadership positions on a variety of US and international science infrastructure projects at Fermi National Accelerator Lab and Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany. He chaired the Particle Accelerator Conference in 2005 and the Linac Conference in 2006. In June 2008 he received the Gersh Budker Prize of the European Physical Society.

Holtkamp has an MS-equivalent degree in physics from the University of Berlin and a PhD in physics from the Technical University in Darmstadt, Germany. His interests include science applications, technology transfer, and the value and future of international science collaborations.

Steven Koonin

Edward Teller Fellow

Steven E. Koonin is the Edward Teller Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Before joining Stanford in 2024, he was a professor at New York University, with appointments in the Stern School of Business, the Tandon School of Engineering, and the Department of Physics. He founded NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, which focuses research and education on the acquisition, integration, and analysis of big data for big cities.

Prior to his time at NYU, Koonin served as undersecretary for science in the US Department of Energy under President Obama from 2009 to 2011, where his portfolio included the climate research program and energy technology strategy. He was the lead author of the US Department of Energy’s Strategic Plan (2011) and the inaugural Department of Energy Quadrennial Technology Review (2011). Before joining the government, Koonin spent five years as chief scientist for BP, researching renewable energy options to move the company “beyond petroleum.”

For almost 30 years, Koonin was a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech. He also served for nine years as Caltech’s vice president and provost, facilitating the research of more than 300 scientists and engineers and catalyzing the development of the world’s largest optical telescope, as well as guiding research initiatives in computational science, bioengineering, and the biological sciences.

Koonin is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His other memberships include the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and JASON, a group of scientists who solve technical problems for the US government; he served as JASON’s chair for six years. He chaired the National Academies’ Divisional Committee for Engineering and Physical Sciences from 2014 to 2019 and was a trustee of the Institute for Defense Analyses from 2014‒24. He is currently an independent governor of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and has served in similar roles for the Los Alamos, Sandia, Brookhaven, and Argonne national laboratories.

Koonin has a BS in physics from Caltech and a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT. He is an award-winning classroom teacher and his public lectures are noted for their clarity in conveying complex subjects. He is the author of the classic 1985 textbook Computational Physics, which introduced methodology for building computer models of complex physical systems. He has published some 200 peer-reviewed papers in the fields of physics and astrophysics, scientific computation, energy technology and policy, and climate science, and he has been the lead author on multiple book-length reports, including two National Academies studies. His bestselling book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters was published in 2021.

Herbert Lin

Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security

Dr. Herb Lin is Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security at the Hoover Institution and senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, both at Stanford University.  His research interests relate broadly to policy-related dimensions of cybersecurity and cyberspace, and he is particularly interested in the use of offensive operations in cyberspace as instruments of national policy and in the security dimensions of information warfare and influence operations on national security.  In addition to his positions at Stanford University, he is Chief Scientist, Emeritus for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies, where he served from 1990 through 2014 as study director of major projects on public policy and information technology, and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Senior Fellow in Cybersecurity (not in residence) at the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies in the School for International and Public Affairs at Columbia University; and a member of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.  In 2016, he served on President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.  Prior to his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.

To read more about Herb Lin's interests, see "An Evolving Research Agenda in Cyber Policy and Security."

Avocationally, he is a longtime folk and swing dancer and a lousy magician. Apart from his work on cyberspace and cybersecurity, he is published in cognitive science, science education, biophysics, and arms control and defense policy. He also consults on K-12 math and science education.

H.R. McMaster

Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow

H.R. McMaster is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. 

Upon graduation from the US Military Academy in 1984, McMaster served as a commissioned officer in the US Army for thirty-four years. He retired as a lieutenant general in June 2018 after serving as the twenty-fifth Assistant to the US President for National Security Affairs. From 2014 to 2017, McMaster designed the future army as the director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center and the deputy commanding general, futures, of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). As commanding general of the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, he oversaw all training and education for the army’s infantry, armor, and cavalry force. He has commanded organizations in wartime including the Combined Joint Inter-Agency Task Force—Shafafiyat in Kabul, Afghanistan, from 2010 to 2012; the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq from 2005 to 2006; and Eagle Troop, Second Armored Cavalry Regiment in Operation Desert Storm from 1990 to 1991. McMaster also served overseas as advisor to the most senior commanders in the Middle East, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He was a Hoover National Security Affairs Fellow from 2002-2003.

McMaster holds a PhD in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was an assistant professor of history at the US Military Academy. He is author of the bestselling books Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World and Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. In August 2024, McMaster released his most recent book, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. His many essays, articles, and book reviews on leadership, history, and the future of warfare have appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

McMaster is the host of Battlegrounds: Vital Perspectives on Today’s Challenges and is a regular on GoodFellows, both produced by the Hoover Institution. He is a Distinguished University Fellow at Arizona State University.

Allison Okamura

Senior Fellow (courtesy) / Science Fellow

Dr. Allison Okamura is a science fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is the Richard W. Weiland Professor of Engineering at Stanford University in the Mechanical Engineering Department and has a courtesy appointment in Computer Science. She is a deputy director of the Wu Tsai Stanford Neurosciences Institute, a founding member and Executive Committee Member of the Stanford Robotics Center, and director of graduate studies in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford.

Dr. Okamura has more than thirty years of experience in research, teaching, and development of human-centered robotics, including medical robots, soft robots, and wearable robots. She directs the Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine (CHARM) Laboratory at Stanford, which develops principles and tools needed to realize advanced robotic and human-machine systems capable of haptic (touch) interaction. She has led research projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the FBI. Dr. Okamura has also been on the advisory boards of companies developing robots for environments ranging from surgical operating rooms to warehouses. She is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and has been recognized for her leadership through numerous awards, including the 2020 IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Technical Achievement Award, 2019 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Service Award, and the 2016 Duca Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford.

Over the past fifteen years, Dr. Okamura has contributed to several iterations of the US Robotics Roadmap, a report that outlines the future of robotics in the United States, including the societal drivers, research needs, and challenges. She leads the robotics focus area of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review (SETR), a university-wide initiative led by the Hoover Institution and the School of Engineering to elucidate technology breakthroughs and their policy implications.