Bio

Dr. Mikel Rodriguez is a leading authority at the intersection of frontier artificial intelligence, national security strategy, and operational mission execution. With over two decades of experience, he bridges the gap between commercial innovation and defense requirements, advising senior government leadership on the adoption and assurance of high-stakes AI systems.

Currently, Dr. Rodriguez serves as the MITRE AI Fellow and as a Strategic Technical Advisor (Special Government Employee) to the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). Previously, he was a Senior Technical Leader at Google DeepMind, where he was a core contributor to the Gemini model family and led the organization's AI Red Team. In this capacity, he defined industry standards for evaluating adversarial risks and established safety governance protocols for frontier models serving billions of users.

Dr. Rodriguez’s public service record includes serving as the Founding Technical Architect for Project Maven (the Pentagon’s Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team), where he designed the technical architecture for the DoD’s first scalable computer vision pipeline. He also served as the Director of the AI & Autonomy Innovation Center at MITRE Labs, overseeing a $120M R&D portfolio dedicated to solving critical challenges across the Six FFRDCs.

A trusted advisor to the national security community, he has supported the Defense Science Board, the National Academy of Sciences, and DARPA. Dr. Rodriguez holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida and completed postdoctoral research at INRIA (France) and Carnegie Mellon University.