Ellen McCarthy

The Honorable Ellen E. McCarthy is a nationally recognized leader in intelligence, national security and information integrity, and the Founder and CEO of the Trust in Media Cooperative, a nonprofit building shared infrastructure for information quality. With more than three decades of experience across the U.S. intelligence community, government and the private sector, Ellen has held senior leadership roles spanning intelligence analysis, operations, policy, enterprise transformation and governance. 

Her career began as an all-source intelligence analyst at the Office of Naval Intelligence and U.S. Atlantic Command. She later served in senior leadership roles including Director of Human Capital and Security for the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Director of Intelligence Operations, Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Coast Guard, where she led its integration into the Intelligence Community. 

From 2015 to 2018, Ellen served as Chief Operating Officer of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), where she drove major governance and organizational reforms and expanded public-private partnerships to expand innovation. She was later confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research (INR) from January 2019 to January 2021 and providing intelligence support to inform U.S. foreign policy. 

In the private sector, she was President of Noblis NSP, where she led the development of advanced cybersecurity and analytics capabilities supporting national security missions. She previously served as President of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), helping shape national conversations on cybersecurity, intelligence integration and homeland security. 

Today through TIM, Ellen is leading the development of common standards, tools and institutional capacity to help organizations evaluate the credibility, provenance and transparency enabling leaders to make better decisions in an era of high velocity information and uncertainty. TIM works with leaders across business, government, media and civil society to embed information quality into decision processes and build durable infrastructure for quality information. 

Ellen serves on the Board of Directors of SAP NS2 and the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation and advises Babel Street, Valkyrie Ai, Security Clearance Jobs, Penn State Applied Research Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.