The Pentagon announced that Eric Schmidt, executive chair of Alphabet, will head its new Defense Innovation Advisory Board, formed to provide advice on technology and related innovation to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. The board will be composed of 12 members, including those outside of the Pentagon representing the commercial technology sector, who can provide the latest knowledge on topics such as rapid prototyping, iterative product development, complex data analysis and the use of cloud applications. Its function will be to provide information on the best and latest practices to support the mission of the department, not to discuss military strategies.

Schmidt became executive chairman of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, in 2015 after serving as CEO then as executive chairman of Google. He graduated from Princeton in 1976 with an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and has served as a University trustee and a member of the Engineering School’s Leadership Council. In 2009 he gave a gift to Princeton to initiate the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund to support the invention, development and utilization of cutting-edge technology that has the capacity to transform research in the natural sciences and engineering.