Rob Murray

Rob Murray is a nonresident senior fellow in the Forward Defense program and the Transatlantic Security Initiative within the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He is the founder and chief executive officer of the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank Development Group and a professor of practice at Johns Hopkins University.

Murray conceived the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank, a proposed multilateral financial institution designed to mobilize public and private capital for defense production, security infrastructure, and national resilience. The initiative seeks to address NATO’s challenge of how to finance rearmament and industrial expansion at the scale required for strategic competition.

Previously, Murray served as NATO’s inaugural head of innovation, where he designed and negotiated the creation of the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic and the NATO Innovation Fund, the Alliance’s sovereign-backed venture capital fund for dual-use technologies. He also led the development of NATO’s Emerging and Disruptive Technologies Strategy and its Principles of Responsible Use for Artificial Intelligence. He later served as chief innovation officer at Saab, Inc. Before entering industry and international policymaking, Murray spent eleven years in the British Army, specializing in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. His work has been published by the Financial Times, Politico, and Chatham House, and he has appeared on Bloomberg Television, Sky News, and the BBC.

Murray holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, an MSc in intelligence management from the University of Lincoln, and an MA in international relations from Staffordshire University. He is an honorary practice fellow of Imperial College London.