Victor Atkins is a nonresident senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He is also the director of Executive Advisory Services for Industrial Cybersecurity in 1898 & Company, a consulting global practice of Burns & McDonnell, where he consults with executives across critical infrastructure sectors on strategies to reduce risks posed by advanced cyber threats.    

Atkins was previously the associate deputy director for operations within the Cyber Intelligence Directorate of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Intelligence & Counterintelligence, where he led and managed the Department’s cyber intelligence mission to deliver all-source intelligence products and services relating to foreign cyber threats to the DOE Enterprise and US sector networks. In this role, Atkins led initiatives at the National Laboratories to develop unique capabilities that discover and characterize sophisticated foreign cyber threats with the potential to disrupt energy sector operations, which required collaboration with stakeholders across the intelligence, national and homeland-security, cybersecurity, and private-energy-sector communities. 

Since joining the DOE in 2009, Atkins also performed key roles in counterterrorism and counterproliferation. Assigned to the White House National Security Council in 2011, he served three years as the director of countering nuclear terrorism, where he led multiple policy coordination efforts to respond to weapons of mass destruction/terrorism threats to US interests at home and overseas. He also served three years on detail at the Central Intelligence Agency’s Weapons and Counterproliferation Mission Center leading community engagement efforts.  

Atkins holds an MA in philosophy from the University of California at San Diego, and a BA in philosophy, graduating with distinction from the University of Virginia.