Mr. Ray A. Rothrock was elected to the Board of Trustees of The Aerospace Corporation on September 1, 2021.
A venture capitalist, cyber expert, clean energy advocate, and philanthropist, Rothrock is founder as well as a board member and investor of FiftySix Investments LLC, an investment firm that focuses on seed-stage, early-stage, and later-stage companies. He is also executive chairman of RedSeal, Inc., an enterprise cybersecurity firm.
Previously, Rothrock was a partner and management committee member at venture capital firm Venrock, where he led Internet and energy investment programs, including nine initial public offerings with multiple listings on the Forbes Midas list. Before that, Rothrock was director of CAD/CAM Marketing at Sun Microsystems.
Rothrock authored Digital Resilience: Is Your Company Ready for the Next Cyber Threat; served as co-executive producer of Pandora’s Promise, a documentary about nuclear energy; and co-produced Chasing the Moon, an Emmy-nominated film that reimagines the race to the moon. He received the SC Media 2020 Reboot Thought Leadership Award for his leadership in cybersecurity. Rothrock has testified to Congress and has spoken at the White House and before the President’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future on the subjects of venture capital, energy, and cyber issues. He is a frequent invited speaker on those topics as well as startup companies, nuclear energy, climate change, and energy policy.
Rothrock is a member of several boards, including Team8, Unbound Inc., TAE Technologies, and Roku, Inc.; serves on the Advisory Council of the Columbia University Center for Radiological Research; and has served on the Department of Energy’s GAIN Executive Advisory Board and Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee. He is vice chairman of the board of the University of Texas/Texas A&M Investment Management Company; a member of the corporation for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); trustee of the Carnegie Institute of Science; and director of the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Rothrock earned a bachelor’s degree in nuclear engineering (summa cum laude) from Texas A&M University, a master’s degree in nuclear engineering from MIT, and an MBA with distinction from the Harvard Business School. He is a distinguished alumnus of both Texas A&M and MIT.