Dr. Timothy Grayson is Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force with the primary responsibility to coordinate concept development, analysis, and implementation of the Secretary’s Operational Imperatives, the critical operational air and space capabilities needed to deter, and if necessary defeat, our pacing challenges. 

Prior to this role, Dr. Grayson was the Director of the Strategic Technology Office (STO) at DARPA.  He led the office in development of breakthrough technologies to enable warfighters to field, operate, and adapt distributed, joint, all-domain combat capabilities at continuous speed.  Dr. Grayson came to STO in 2018 from a varied career in government and industry.  Immediately prior to DARPA he was the founder and president of Fortitude Mission Research LLC, a consulting company specializing in strategy and technology analysis related to defense and intelligence.  Dr. Grayson has extensive government experience.  He spent several years as a senior intelligence officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Directorate of Science and Technology and culminating in a tour at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Prior to CIA, Dr. Grayson was a program manager and senior scientist at DARPA and before that was a research fellow at Air Force Wright Laboratory (now part of Air Force Research Laboratory). Dr. Grayson holds a Ph.D. in Physics from University of Rochester, where he specialized in quantum optics, and a B.S. in Physics from University of Dayton with minors in mathematics and computer science.