Yisroel Brumer, PhD

Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Yisroel Brumer, PhD is a Co-Founder and the CEO of DEFCON AI. Dr. Brumer is a Founding Partner of Red Cell Partners, DEFCON AI’s parent company, and a Co-Founder and the founding CEO of Zephyr AI. He joined Red Cell following an extensive career of executive leadership in the Department of Defense (DoD) culminating as Acting Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE). Reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense, he led the annual program review process that built the five-year defense program totaling over $3.5 trillion. Dr. Brumer also led CAPE’s oversight of all major investment programs, emphasizing analyses of alternatives, investment strategies, and programmatic tradeoffs. He led the SecDef-directed studies on high-stakes issues known as Strategic Portfolio Reviews that drove the strategic direction of the Department for the last decade. He was a member of DoD’s most senior decision bodies, including the Nuclear Weapons Council, the Missile Defense Executive Board, and the Deputy Secretary’s Management Action Group, among many others. Yisroel holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics and a M.Sc. in Chemistry from Harvard University and has published several works on the physics of complex systems and the application of mathematics and computation to biology and cancer.