Cara Lapointe

Cara LaPointe is a Senior Fellow at Georgetown University within the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation. She works at the intersection of emerging technologies, leadership, policy and ethics. Her primary focus is in autonomous and unmanned systems and, more recently, blockchain technology. During two decades as a U.S. naval officer, she also held numerous roles in the areas of acquisitions, ship design and production, naval force architecture, as well as power and energy systems. Cara is a patented engineer, having co-designed a passive diver thermal protection system for deep-sea divers. At the Deep Submergence Lab of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, she conducted research in deep-ocean autonomous underwater vehicle navigation and sensor-fusion algorithms. Cara served in the White House for First Lady Michelle Obama developing public-private partnerships in support of veterans and military families, and she returned later as the Interim Director of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. Cara holds a Ph.D. awarded jointly from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, M.S. and Nav. Eng. degrees from MIT, an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford and a B.S. from the United States Naval Academy.

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