Meet Charles

Dr. Charles Johnson-Bey is a leader in global organizational change for Booz Allen’s commercial and defense clients. Based out of our Belcamp, Maryland, office, he develops and executes innovative resilience strategies that reflect evolving markets and technology dynamics.

Charles has more than 25 years of engineering experience spanning cyber resilience, signal processing, system architecture, prototyping, and hardware. In leading our engineering and science community, he inspires leaders and promotes innovation, collaboration, and sharing of intellectual capital across the firm.

Prior to joining Booz Allen, he was a research engineer at Corning Incorporated and Motorola Corporate Research Labs and taught electrical engineering at Morgan State University. He also worked at Lockheed Martin Corporation for 17 years, where he galvanized the company’s cyber resources and led research and development activities with organizations including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Microsoft Research, and the GE Global Research Center.

Charles serves on the Whiting School of Engineering Advisory Board and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Advisory Committee, both at Johns Hopkins University. He is also on the Cybersecurity Institute Advisory Board for the Community College of Baltimore County.

Charles received both an M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Delaware and a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Johns Hopkins University. 

What makes you excited to come to work every day?

Collaborating and brainstorming on the creation and innovative use of technology makes me excited to come to work every day. 

What’s a skill/lesson you learned from your experiences, and how is it still relevant to you today?

When I was a university professor, I learned that you must be humble to learn. This is still relevant to me today, because through humility, I can learn from every situation and every person that I meet. 

What are the three most pressing needs in innovation and technology?

Talent, processes, and imagination. The talent needed is composed of innovative people with varied experience and fundamental skills. Processes need to be designed so they’re repeatable and scalable across multiple domains. Most of all, we need the imagination of a diverse and courageous team to make it all happen. 

How do you inspire your teams to do excellent work? How do your teams inspire you?

People are inspired by success and authenticity. The more authentic a person can be at work, the more inspired they will be—and, subsequently, the more successful the team will be. I’m inspired by the authenticity that I see in people every day. It’s our responsibility to live our values out loud.