Dr. David Rushing Dewhurst joined DARPA as a program manager in April 2024 to design, execute, and transition programs at the nexus of technology and economic strategy. His research interests include financial intelligence, the design of economic mechanisms and financial assets, capital markets, and payment systems.
Before joining DARPA as a program manager, Dewhurst served as a technical advisor for government research and development programs at the agency and was a Capstone Fellow at Yale University. Dewhurst also worked as a senior scientist at a defense research and development firm, a risk management data scientist in the financial industry, and a computer scientist at a federally funded research and development center.
Dewhurst earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics, mathematics, and political science, an M.S. in mathematics, and a doctorate in complex systems and data science, all from the University of Vermont. He also attended the Séminaire de Mathématiques Supérieures at the University of Montreal.
programs
Resilient Supply-and-Demand Networks (RSDN)
The Department of Defense (DoD) has a critical need to secure its sources of materiel against both intentional—including adversarial—and unintentional disruptions. Extensive global networks of private-sector vendors, commonly called “supply chains,” collaborate to provide these key resources, including precursor components and materials. The Resilient Supply-and-Demand Networks (RSDN) program adopts the phrase “supply-and-demand network” (SDN) in lieu of “supply chain” to emphasize that the strategic challenges are more extensive than the logistic challenges of delivering (“supplying”) materiel.
Anticipatory and Adaptive Anti-Money Laundering (A3ML)
Money laundering directly harms American citizens and global interests. Half of North Korea's nuclear program is funded by laundered funds, according to statements by the White House, while a federal indictment alleges that money launderers tied to Chinese underground banking are a primary source of financial services for Mexico's Sinaloa cartel. Despite recent anti-money laundering efforts, the United States (U.S.) still faces challenges in countering money laundering effectively for several reasons. According to Congressional research, money laundering schemes often evade detection and disruption, as anti-money laundering (AML) efforts today rely on manual analysis of large amounts of data and are limited by finite resources and human cognitive processing speed. To address these challenges, DARPA seeks to revolutionize the practice of anti-money laundering through its A3ML program. A3ML aims to develop algorithms to sift through financial transactions graphs for suspicious patterns, learn new patterns to anticipate future activities, and develop techniques to represent patterns of illicit financial behavior in a concise, machine-readable format that is also easily understood by human analysts.
National Security Economic Theory (NASCENT)
The National Security Economic Theory (NASCENT) program will aim to establish a principled theoretical foundation for geoeconomics, enabling evidence-based economic statecraft and defining a rigorous scholarly field of quantitative geoeconomics. The program seeks to achieve the following objectives: (1) Test the technical hypothesis that economic mechanism design, computer science formal methods, and experimental economics can be combined to construct a robust scientific framework for geoeconomics; and (2) Prevent strategic surprise by building the methodologies and tools necessary to both anticipate and mitigate unintended consequences of economic statecraft.
Nearly all businesses with over $5 million in sales use some form of automated workflow, known as business logic, to manage operations. Around the world, business logic systems support essential tasks such as the administration and operation of seaports worldwide and the assembly of defense systems. However, the vulnerabilities and exposure to loss due to operational risk from coding errors in these tools can range from annoyances to business-threatening outcomes. Identifying potentially problematic issues would provide increased resilience in the manufacturing and communications sectors and reduce inefficiencies in supply chain management. The Business Process Logic (BPL) program aims to characterize and resolve vulnerabilities in business logic systems to protect defense-critical workflows for government and business, such as manufacturing, infrastructure, and logistics. BPL will extract representations from business logic and use those representations to characterize and mitigate faults and vulnerabilities identified in workflow environments.