Mikel Rodriguez, Ph.D.

Mikel Rodriguez, Ph.D., an internationally recognized leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is a MITRE Fellow. 

Rodriguez has over two decades of experience bringing transformative, AI-enabled solutions to complex challenges in both the private and public sectors. At Google DeepMind, he co-founded and led a team focused on research to enable the secure deployment of frontier AI systems, particularly for high-stakes applications. As a core team member of Google’s Project Gemini, he helped develop and deploy foundational models that impacted products used by billions.

He has also served as a special government employee for the Defense Innovation Unit, where he helped the U.S. government identify and adopt emerging technologies, and previously led MITRE’s AI and Autonomy Innovation Center.

Rodriguez works with hundreds of data scientists and AI engineers who provide deep expertise across the executive branch, utilizing resources like MITRE’s Federal AI Sandbox, a supercomputer built in partnership with NVIDIA. The Sandbox can train large language models and tackle government-specific AI tasks, such as enhancing military command and control, securing infrastructure, and reducing fraud.

As MITRE’s work supporting federal efforts to deploy AI solutions continues to grow, Rodriguez brings deep expertise in enterprise-scale AI deployment, accelerating government AI adoption, strengthening AI security, building secure and reliable AI, and fostering public-private collaboration. 

Rodriguez completed his Ph.D. at the University of Central Florida Computer Vision Lab and was a post-doctoral fellow at Willow in Paris, France.