Cortney Weinbaum

Cortney Weinbaum (she/her) is a senior management scientist at the RAND Corporation. She specializes in intelligence and space topics, and she has worked with the Intelligence Community (IC) and Department of Defense to improve policies, practices, and technologies. She has improved analytic and collection tradecraft; identified emerging technologies and their impact on space architectures, special operations, countering weapons of mass destruction, and intelligence; and examined new workforce models for intelligence agencies. She facilitated cross-discipline teams to apply structured analytic techniques to intractable intelligence topics, and she has applied wargaming and scenario-based planning against both operational and enterprise topics.

Weinbaum led two teams to receive the Director of National Intelligence’s Meritorious Unit Citation for advancing the IC’s knowledge of two intractable intelligence topics. Since joining RAND, she has studied emerging technologies and their implications for intelligence; unclassified intelligence; the ethics of scientific research; and other topics. She began her career as an intelligence officer developing radio frequency and electromagnetic MASINT collection systems.

She serves on the boards of directors of Carrie Simon House, a charity that provides housing, financial literacy, and life skills to homeless mothers with young children in Washington, D.C.; and CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) of D.C., which provides trained and dedicated volunteers to support children who have open abuse and neglect cases in D.C. Family Court. Weinbaum earned her B.S. in physics from the University of Michigan.