Director, Strategic Technologies Program
Matt Pearl serves as Director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He is also Of Counsel at Jenner & Block, in both its Communications, Internet and Technology Practice and its Critical and Emerging Technologies Practice. At CSIS, he collaborates on a bipartisan basis with government decisionmakers and develop innovative policy solutions on critical and emerging technologies, including AI, cloud, telecommunications, cybersecurity, space, digital assets and decentralized finance, and quantum and other forms of unconventional computing. At Jenner, he advises clients on telecommunications regulation, cybersecurity, cloud and data centers, spectrum management, and other emerging technology regulation, and how they should engage strategically with decisionmakers at the White House, Congress, DOD, the FCC, NTIA, and other departments and agencies.
Until August 2024, he was director for emerging technologies and special advisor to the deputy national security advisor at the White House National Security Council, where he focused on technology and telecommunications issues. At the NSC, he advanced key White House efforts, including the US Cyber Trust Mark, the Presidential Memorandum on Spectrum, the National Spectrum Strategy, and the global 6G principles statement. Prior to that, Matt was an associate bureau chief at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), where he was responsible for managing wireless policy, including overseeing many of the largest spectrum transitions and auctions in history.
Before joining the FCC, he worked as a law clerk for Judge Harris Hartz of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Prior to that, he was a law clerk for Judge Lawrence Kahn of the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York. From 2014 to 2020, Matt was a research affiliate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where he was part of an effort to advance networking technologies. Matt earned his JD at Yale Law School, where he served as a submission’s editor for the Yale Journal on Regulation.