Michael Hsieh is a seasoned advisor to commercial, nonprofit, and academic organizations, specializing in securing R&D funding from ARPAs (e.g., DARPA, ARPA-H, IARPA). As a former program manager at DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), he led programs with budgets exceeding $146M, focusing on secure computation, secure data, and large-scale data analysis.

Before DARPA, Michael was a senior staff scientist at various industry labs, overseeing projects in quantum information science, ISR, biometrics, and open-source data analysis. He also held senior advisory roles across DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), Defense Sciences Office (DSO), and Tactical Technologies Office (TTO).

Following his tenure at DARPA, Michael served as a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow and acted as a Track 1.5 interlocutor with allied governments and defense ministries, helping establish ARPA-like organizations.

Michael is a recipient of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Outstanding Achievement. He holds a BA in Mathematics and a BA in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Quantum Chemistry from Princeton University, where he was a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow. He completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Southern California and HRL Laboratories. Michael has published 17 peer-reviewed papers in quantum chemistry, control theory, and numerical methods, in prestigious journals such as Science, Physical Review, and the Journal of Mathematical Physics.