Pierre Chao
Pierre Chao is a Managing Partner and co-founder of Renaissance Strategic Advisors, an Arlington, VA based aerospace/defense strategy firm. He is also a Senior Associate Non-Resident at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington D.C.-based, non-partisan defense and foreign policy think tank.

From 2003-2007 he was a Senior Fellow and Director of Defense-Industrial Initiatives at CSIS. 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.

From 1999-2003, Pierre was a managing director and senior aerospace/defense analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB), where he was responsible for following the U.S. and global aerospace/defense industry and managing a global team of seven analysts. He remained a CSFB independent senior adviser with the Equity Research group and then Investment Banking from 2003-2006. Prior to joining CFSB, Pierre was the senior aerospace/defense analyst at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter from 1995-1999 and the senior aerospace/defense industry analyst at Smith Barney during 1994.

Over the course of his Wall Street career Pierre garnered numerous awards. 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.

Prior to his career as a Wall Street analyst, he was 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).

Pierre is a member of the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board of the National Research Council. Pierre 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 Task Force, the 2007/2008 DBB Task Force on Relations with the Industrial Base, the 2008 DBB Task Force on Export Control Best Practices, the 2008 DBB Task Force on Rethinking the Role of the Comptroller and the 2008 DBB Task Force on Review of Acquisition Program Cost. He was also a member of a National Research Council study on America’s Future in Space (2009), a study on Modeling Simulation & Games (2009), a 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 the Defense Acquisition University.

Pierre earned dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Political Science and Management Science from M.I.T. Pierre is a holder of the right to use the Chartered Financial Analyst designation. He has a Top Secret clearance.