Most founders who sell down their stake in a company move on to another startup. Justin Fulcher went back to school instead, building an academic record in international security that now runs parallel to his work in government technology.
From Telemedicine to the Classroom
Fulcher’s business career began with RingMD, a telemedicine company he co-founded in 2013 that connected patients across Asia to remote physicians. He later stepped back from managing the company day to day, though he remains a board member and minority shareholder. Rather than immediately launching another venture, he turned toward formal study of the security and policy questions tied to his later government work.
In 2023, Justin Fulcher earned a Master’s degree in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, a program known for training analysts who go on to work in intelligence, defense, and arms control fields. He is now pursuing a Doctorate in International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, one of the more demanding programs in the country for that discipline.
The academic path lines up neatly with his professional one. Around the same period, Justin Fulcher joined the Department of Defense as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, where his portfolio included acquisition reform and technology adoption inside a notoriously slow-moving bureaucracy. His current interests extend into defense technology and supply chain resilience, particularly around critical materials such as rare-earth elements, a subject that sits squarely at the intersection of his coursework and his advisory role.
Few entrepreneurs pursue a doctorate mid-career, and fewer still do so while holding a government advisory post. Justin Fulcher’s decision to combine both suggests a bet that the credentials matter less as resume points than as tools for understanding problems he plans to keep working on for years to come. Refer to this article to learn more.
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