Steven Grundman is a CRA Vice President and Director of Aerospace and Defense Consulting. His practice applies the firm’s strengths in economics, corporate finance, and public policy to solve the strategic and operational challenges confronting aerospace and defense companies. Mr. Grundman is particularly focused on facilitating transatlantic business partnerships, supporting the capital markets’ assessments in the sector, and assisting companies prepare and execute strategic initiatives.
Before joining CRA, Mr. Grundman was Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Industrial Affairs and Installations) in the US Department of Defense. During a six year appointment at the Pentagon, he directed the Department of Defense’s industrial relations, spearheaded innovative reform initiatives, and orchestrated the Department of Defense’s program-financial planning process.

Pierre Chao is a Managing Partner and co-founder of Renaissance Strategic Advisors, a strategy and financial advisory firm.  Pierre brings over 20 years of management consulting, investment banking and policy expertise in the aerospace/defense industry.

He is also a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington D.C.-based, non-partisan defense and foreign policy think tank.  He was a Senior Fellow and Director of Defense-Industrial Initiatives at CSIS from 2003-2007.  At CSIS he directed a team of five focused on policy issues related to the defense-industrial base, including defense industrial policy, acquisition reform, trans-Atlantic relations, export controls, and technology/innovation policy.

Before joining CSIS in 2003, Pierre was a managing director and senior aerospace/defense analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston from 1999-2003, where he was responsible for following the U.S. and global aerospace/defense industry.  He remained a CSFB independent senior adviser from 2003-2006.

Prior to joining CFSB, Pierre was the senior aerospace/defense analyst at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter from 1995-1999. He served as the senior aerospace/defense industry analyst at Smith Barney during 1994 and as a director at JSA International, a Boston/Paris-based management-consulting firm that focused on the aerospace/defense industry (1986-88, 1990-93). Pierre was also a co-founder of JSA Research, an equity research boutique specializing in the aerospace/defense industry. Before signing on with JSA, he worked in the New York and London offices of Prudential-Bache Capital Funding as a mergers and acquisitions banker focusing on aerospace/defense (1988-90).

Over the course of his Wall Street career, Pierre participated in 31 aerospace/defense equity offerings/IPOs raising $11.7 billion and dozens of buy-side and sell-side M&A assignments.  In addition, Pierre garnered numerous awards while working on Wall Street. Institutional Investor ranked Pierre's team the number one global aerospace/defense group every year eligible from 2000-02 and he was on the Institutional Investor All-America Research Team every year eligible from 1996-2002. He was ranked the number one aerospace/defense analyst by corporations in the 1998-2000 Reuters Polls, the number one aerospace/defense analyst in the 1995-99 Greenwich Associates polls, and appeared on the Wall Street Journal All-Star list in four of seven eligible years. 

He was a member of the 2005 Defense Science Board Summer Study (Assessment of Transformation), 2006 DSB Summer Study (Strategic Technology Vectors), the 2006/2007 DSB Task Force on the Health of the Defense Industry, the 2007/2008 Defense Business Board Capability Requirements Identification and Development Processes study, the 2007/2008 DBB Task Force on Relations with the Industrial Base and the 2008 DBB study on Export Control Best Practices.  He was also a member of a National Research Council study on Critical Technology Accessibility (2006) and a member of an Army Science Board task force on Use of Venture Capital (2001).  In 2000, Pierre was appointed by President Clinton to the Presidential Commission on Offsets in International Trade.  He is also a guest lecturer at the National Defense University and an Intermittent Professor at the Defense Acquisition University.

Chao earned dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Political Science and Management Science from M.I.T.

Michael is the Deputy Managing Editor for Defense and also covers national security policymaking, budgets and congressional affairs. Prior to coming to Aviation Week in 2005, Michael was a reporter for the Washington Post and BNA publications covering technology, business and federal acquisition. He received a master's in print journalism from Syracuse University in 1998, and a bachelor's in philosophy, psychology and communications studies from Vanderbilt University in 1997.