Dr. Greg Witkop is a surgeon–scientist focused on grounding mental health in biology with the same rigor as the rest of medicine. A student of visual neuroscience, he is a former U.S. Army Flight Surgeon and board-certified ophthalmologist who left private practice after 9/11 to serve in counterproliferation efforts within the U.S. Intelligence Community and Department of Defense, and later spent over a decade as the FBI’s Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory.

Motivated by Brown University’s 2021 Costs of War Project—and personal loss—he postponed retirement to serve a tour at DARPA to help translate advances in neurobiology, neuroimaging, and neuromodulation into measurable, biologically grounded approaches to mental health, guided by a simple surgical principle: see what you sew, and sew what you see.

As a DARPA Program Manager (2021–2025), he led programs bridging neuroscience and clinical care to address suicidality and the invisible wounds of war, demonstrating that neurobehavioral models can enhance risk prediction and that combining cognitive therapies with noninvasive neuromodulation can produce durable improvements in resilience. 

This work now informs his efforts advancing biomarker-driven mental health through Renaissance Philanthropy.

Greg is deeply grateful to have worked alongside mission-driven colleagues, and even more grateful for his family. His wife Maria—a retired FBI agent, profiler, negotiator, and author of Reach: Rewriting the Story of Power—has yet to lose a “discussion.” Their children and, as of this year granddaughter, remain his greatest joy, along with three Buddhist teachers cleverly disguised as two Old English Mastiffs and a Whippet.