Joseph Helman serves in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) where he is a member of the Senior National Intelligence Service. He has served in ODNI since 2006, and has over twenty-five years of national security experience in the Intelligence Community and Department of Defense. From 2011-19 he served on the National Intelligence Council, and from 2014-19 as a National Intelligence Officer where he served as the principal subject matter expert to national security decision makers and led the Intelligence Community in the production of strategic analysis and providing analytic support to policymakers in a global functional area of intelligence.

Dr. Helman served as Director for Intelligence for the US Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism (Graham-Talent Commission, 2008), and as the National Intelligence Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1995-2005 he provided analytic and programmatic support to the Intelligence Community and Department of Defense while in the private sector, and prior to his government service he worked on Middle East projects at the United States Institute of Peace.

In addition to teaching at NYU, Dr. Helman holds an appointment at Georgetown University as a Distinguished Fellow, Adjunct Professor, and Co-Chair of the Global Politics and Security Concentration in the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) Program in the Walsh School of Foreign Service. Previously, he taught at George Washington University as an Adjunct Professor in Security Policy Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs and in the Political Science Department. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.