The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies is excited to announce Dr. Lisa Costa as our newest Senior Fellow.

Dr. Costa is the Director of Countering WMD and Violent Extremism at MITRE. She brings over three decades of progressive leadership tackling complex, sensitive intelligence problems facing our nation's most critical missions. She is an expert in counter terrorism (CT) and intelligence analysis. She chairs MITRE’s Corporate CWMD and CT Council and was the lead for IR&D in Enhancing Intelligence Analysis (EIA), ensuring a focus on innovation, rigor and measurable progress on “hard problems”.

Previously, Dr. Costa was the Executive Director of Integration for MITRE’s National Security and Engineering FFRDC responsible for integrating across missions, sponsors, and programs. She provided executive strategic planning for MITRE’s business operations and advancing the Center's $1B business base.

Prior to this, Dr. Costa was MITRE’s Chief Scientist for the Combatant Commands and Defense and Service Intelligence agencies. She was on the OSD Senior Technical Experts Group providing advice on data science and computational social science.

Dr. Costa was responsible for establishing the largest data repository and data mining capability outside the NCR in support of special mission unit target adjudication. As the Director of the Non-Traditional Information and Knowledge Exploitation cell, located at USSOCOM, she led multidisciplinary teams to develop worldwide assessments using all source data. These efforts were at the request of Combatant Commanders via P4 memoranda to the Chairman, JCS. This work has been used as a model for intelligence centers across DOD, US government agencies, and federal law enforcement.

Dr. Costa was on the Defense Science Boards (DSBs) for Joint Forces and Special Operations in Support of the Global War on Terrorism, Intelligence in Support of Countering Terrorism, and The DOD’s Role in Homeland Security. Dr. Costa earned a BS (1986) degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, an MBA (1990), and a PhD (1993) in Computer Science.