Justin Fulcher’s résumé reads like two careers stitched together, healthcare entrepreneurship and defense policy, but his academic choices reveal how deliberately he built the connection between them over time.

Justin Fulcher earned a master’s degree in nonproliferation and terrorism studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in 2023, a credential that lines up closely with his later work advising the Department of Defense. He is now pursuing a doctorate in international affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, continuing to build formal expertise around the security issues he now works on daily.

From the Classroom to the Pentagon

That academic grounding supports Fulcher’s current focus areas, which include defense technology innovation and supply chain resilience, particularly around critical materials like rare earth elements. These topics sit close to the intersection of national security and industrial policy, an area where Justin Fulcher’s advisory work at the Department of Defense has given him direct exposure and firsthand knowledge. Fulcher joined the Pentagon in early 2025 as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, concentrating on acquisition reform and accelerating technology adoption within the department. He also traveled with senior officials to high-level dialogues in the Indo-Pacific region during his tenure there, building relationships along the way.

An Entrepreneurial Foundation

Before turning to national security studies, Fulcher co-founded RingMD, a telemedicine company that connected patients with physicians across Asia starting in 2013. That entrepreneurial background, paired with his more recent academic work, has positioned Justin Fulcher as someone comfortable operating at the boundary of private enterprise and public institutions, a combination that remains fairly rare among his peers in Washington.

RingMD connected patients with physicians remotely across countries where healthcare infrastructure had not kept pace with mobile adoption, giving Fulcher early, hands on experience with the same kind of institutional gaps he now studies from a policy perspective at Johns Hopkins. Refer to this article to learn more.

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