Keith McBride is the chief of staff for The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and serves on the GTRI Executive Council.  His primary roles include advising and assisting the Director and senior leadership team, and the chief facilitator for: GTRI strategic development, key sponsor interactions, internal and external messaging, and organizational growth management. 

McBride joined the GTRI team in 2015 as an embedded researcher in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. His purpose at ASD(R&E) focused on understanding the emerging military competitions to U.S. military capability advantages and researching the potential technology development areas to maintain or restore the U.S. competitive advantage across all domains. McBride’s duties included identifying emerging threat challenges through research with the intelligence community, war fighting commands, and pentagon staffs and leading teams of researchers from many of the military, national, university, and federal research laboratories that support the Department of Defense.

Prior to joining GTRI, McBride was a senior military advisor to Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering while deploying strategy, managing correspondence, and overseeing operations across four divisions.  He served 25 years in the U.S. Air Force as pilot, commander, and staff officer focusing on emerging threat environments and strategy for U.S. capability development. This included assignments in Secretary of the Air Force International Affair and postings in South Korea, Europe, the Gulf States, and temporary duty assignments around the globe. McBride earned a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University and Masters’ in Military Science and Strategic Studies from the Air University.

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