Aaron Bartnick

Aaron Bartnick is the Distinguished Policy Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Critical Technology Initiative and has spent nearly 15 years at the intersection of technology, national security, and global markets. He most recently served as assistant director for technology security and governance at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where he led OSTP’s economic and technology security portfolios including its role on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), outbound investment policy, research security, and several strategic industries including unmanned systems and open-source semiconductors. He also represented OSTP on issues including artificial intelligence, data security, quantum computing, and digital assets.

Before joining the White House, Bartnick served as senior policy advisor at the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Investment Security, where he was the Department’s senior advisor on foreign investment risk analysis and mitigation.He led more than 450 Treasury and OSTP reviews of more than $460 billion in transactions across virtually every emerging technology sector.

Earlier in his career, Bartnick served as a consultant with geopolitical risk firm Macro Advisory Partners, held senior leadership roles with Congressman Seth Moulton and several early-stage startups, and founded the American University of Iraq - Sulaimani's Entrepreneurship Initiative to strengthen the country’s startup ecosystem. He began his career working on President Obama’s re-election campaign. Bartnick holds master’s degrees in business and public administration from the University of Oxford, where he was a Skoll Scholar, and the Harvard Kennedy School. He received his AB with honors from Brown University.