Deborah Cheverton is a nonresident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Forward Defense program within the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Cheverton is a senior trade and investment advisor with the British embassy where she works on foreign direct investment in support of bilateral and multilateral defense and security priorities. Before working in trade, she worked for the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence (MOD) for fifteen years working across a range of policy and delivery areas with a particular focus on science and technology policy, industrial strategy, capability development, and international collaboration. 

Cheverton’s research interests center around the impact of advancements in digital and other emerging technologies on conflict and competition, as well as the industrial and international collaboration issues that follow. Prior to her Atlantic Council fellowship, she served as private secretary to the second permanent secretary of the MOD, during which she played a key role in driving innovation and pace into the digital, data, and modernization agenda. Previous roles include leading the communications and engagement team working on the 2021 UK Integrated Review, two years as a private secretary to the UK minister for defence procurement, and three years in the British Defence Staff in Washington, DC, where she was an early advocate of the United Kingdom’s approach to innovation in its 2015 Strategic Defence and Spending Review. Cheverton began her career as an analyst in the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and was deployed to Afghanistan in that capacity in 2013. 

She holds a master’s degree in physics from the University of Manchester and a BA with honors in international relations from the Open University.