Watson Fagan

Bio

Watson Fagan is the deputy director of Laboratory for Analytic Sciences (LAS) located on North Carolina State University’s Centennial Campus. As the LAS deputy director, he partners with academia, industry, and the government to create innovative technology that bolsters national security and improves intelligence analysis. In this role, Watson represents the National Security Agency (NSA) and oversees the daily government operation of LAS.

As a career employee of the NSA, he’s led over a half dozen organizations with the agency. This included the supervision of over 100 employees and the management of multimillion-dollar programs.

Before joining LAS, Watson served as a congressional fellow on the staff of United States Senator Mike Rounds from South Dakota. He supported Senator Rounds’ key legislative initiatives in the areas of artificial intelligence, cyber, foreign relations, the armed services, and veterans’ issues.

Watson has had two joint duty assignments, one as a congressional fellow and the other as the National Counterintelligence Officer for Cyber, where he represented, among other duties, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) at the White House complex for various National Security Council staff working groups.

During his time at the NCSC, he was the primary author of a congressionally mandated Foreign Economic Espionage in Cyberspace Report for Congress. The 2018 report received positive press coverage by national news media for the attention it brought to threats posed by foreign economic espionage.

Watson is a native Floridian and has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from the University of Maryland (College Park) and Mississippi State University.