Paul Dabbar

Deputy Secretary Department of Commerce

The Honorable Paul Dabbar is Deputy Secretary for the U.S. Department of Commerce. Deputy Secretary Dabbar is the Department’s chief operations officer and day-to-day manager of a budget of $11.4 billion, 13 operating units, and 47,000 employees. Incl. NOAA, Patent & Trademark Office, NIST, Telecom & Info. Admin, Intl Trade Admin, Bureau of Industry & Security, Economics & Statistics Admin, and Space Commerce He was most recently Dist. Visiting Fellow at Columbia Univ, board member of Dominion Energy & AirJoule Tech., contributor to the WSJ editorial page, and co-founder & former CEO of Bohr Quantum Tech, a spin-out of Caltech developing quantum networking technologies, Previously the U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed him as the Dept of Energy’s 4th Under Secretary for Science. He was the Dept’s leader on energy research & tech, science & commercialization. He managed over 60,000 people with a budget of $15 billion at over 100 sites, managing the majority of the US National Labs. He also ran the Environ. Mgt. program managing $500 billion in nuclear liabilities from nuclear weapons ops, completing multibillion dollar projects ahead of schedule and under budget Areas of research he led: energy sciences, nuclear & high energy physics, adv. computing, fusion and biological sciences. He also led commercialization of tech from the Natl Labs. His leadership of adv. computing led to commissioning of four global #1 computers, deploying GPU chips for the first time in a high performance computer & for AI. And he ran the majority of the Nat’l Quantum Initiative. During his tenure researchers supported by DOE won several Nobel Prizes incl for the Li-Ion battery & Gene Editing/CRISPR. And the US became a net-energy exporter for the first time since 1950 Prior to DOE he worked in operations, finance, and strategy roles in the energy & defense sectors. As Managing Director at JPMorgan, he had over $400bn in global transaction leadership across all energy sectors. He also had a leadership role in the commodity trading business. Before JPMorgan, he was a nuclear submarine officer and worked at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. He is a graduate of the US Naval Academy & Columbia Univ He has been widely published, incl Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Columbia Univ. & Hoover Inst He is one of a small number of people who have traveled to both North & South Poles (90°N/90°S): North Pole by submarine to conduct military & environ. missions and South Pole for high energy physics missions at South Pole Station. He also completed a 140.6 mile Ironman triathlon