Cortney Weinbaum is a National Security Policy Associate at RAND Corporation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, think-tank.

She has spent 14 years in the Intelligence Community and Department of Defense improving policies, practices, and technologies. She has improved analytic and collection tradecraft, identified emerging technologies and their impact on special operations, countering weapons of mass destruction, and intelligence, and facilitated strategic planning with senior executive leadership teams. She has facilitated cross-discipline teams to apply structured analytic techniques to intractable intelligence topics, and she has applied wargaming and scenario-based planning against both operational and enterprise topics. She led two teams to receive the Director of National Intelligence’s Meritorious Unit Citation. She began her career developing radio frequency and electromagnetic MASINT collection systems.

She serves on the Board of Directors of Carrie Simon House, a charity that provides housing, financial literacy, and life skills to homeless mothers with young children in Washington, DC.

Fun fact: When hearing about the Challenger space shuttle crash in 1986, at the age of 5, she decided she wanted to be an astro-phys-ys-ysist when she grew up, so she could study outer space.