Robert Quartel

Rob Quartel is a multi-sector serial entrepreneur, former US Federal Maritime Commissioner, an internationally recognized expert on US national maritime and transportation security policy, and Executive Chairman and Founder of NTELX, Inc, based in McLean, Va. The company provides advanced autonomous decision support technologies and applied risk and decision analytic solutions. The company’s technology has been applied widely to food and product safety, Medicaid and sophisticated labor eligibility, fraud solutions, solar energy finance, international truck transit, and more.

Rob has for over 30 years been considered the leading advocate for international shipping deregulation and reform of archaic US maritime laws. He took an early role in shaping the public policy response to international container security and was the first to describe a technology approach to “push the borders out” via a “virtual” electronic data border – a breakthrough paradigm that requires profiling cargoes prior to embarkation by merging commercially available data with intelligence information. He has been described in the international transportation press as a policy “iconoclast.”

He has been a business and policy entrepreneur and innovator throughout his career, including in high speed rail, innovative shipbuilding technology (unique modular double hull tanker design funded by DARPA), intelligent data process automation and across the early stage technology space.

He has run three times for Federal office, including US Senate (Florida) in 1992. He served at the startup of the US EPA, as a staff member at the nascent US Federal Energy Office, in the Ford White House’s Presidential Clemency Board and later as Issue Director for the Ford Campaign; as Domestic Policy Director for George Bush (1979), and as an issue advisor to several other Presidential campaigns.

Rob has served as a Member/Advisor to the Army Science Board, is a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former Board Member of the Wilson Council, and serves on numerous boards and advisory committees related to early stage and maritime technology and US homeland security policy including: the Northern Virginia Technology Council; the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Agency and Center for Innovative Technologies; Old Dominion University’s Blue Oceans tech initiative; the College of William and Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences Innovation Fund, and serves now as the Vice Chairman of GoVirginia Region 6, the Commonwealth of Virginia’s economic development initiative.

Rob has written and testified extensively on maritime and security issues and modern technology challenges. He continues to be involved in numerous technology startups as an investor and advisor; founded the Mindshare Alumni (1000 tech executives in the DMV); and the Bulldog Innovation Group, a venture fund he established with other Yale alumni to invest in Yale alumni startups. His podcast “Explaining the Swamp” is in the top 5 percent of all podcasts. He has a degree in biology from Rice and a management degree (MPPM) from the Yale School of Management. Rob is married to Michela English, a national business leader and former CEO of Fight for Children, a DC-based education-reform non-profit. The couple has two adult children and now lives on Gwynn’s Island in Mathews County, Virginia.