Georgetown has hired Josh Bornstein, a federal executive with significant experience in emergency management and security, as its new vice president for public safety.
Bornstein will begin his new role on Sept. 2.
Most recently, Bornstein served as the chief security officer and deputy associate administrator for mission support at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), where he oversaw FEMA’s security programs for its employees and facilities and a $500 million budget. Bornstein previously held leadership roles in homeland security, public health and food at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
In the newly created role, Bornstein will oversee the Georgetown University Police Department (GUPD), the Department of Public Safety (DPS) on the Hilltop and Capitol Campus, the Office of Emergency Management, Office of Environmental Health & Safety and the Office of Public Health across Georgetown’s campuses downtown and in the Georgetown neighborhood.
“We are honored to welcome Josh Bornstein to Georgetown and to our campus community,” said David Green, senior vice president and chief operating officer. “Josh brings a wealth of expertise in security and emergency management and is a proven and dedicated leader in working across organizations to uphold and protect public safety.”
The role marks a return to higher education, where Bornstein began his career.
“I know that every single day, the people at Georgetown are focused on creating knowledge and applying the Jesuit values,” he said. “To apply what I know to protect a community that is doing good is a dream come true.”
A Passion for Public Safety
Bornstein discovered his career path in public safety while an undergraduate at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
The Kentucky native was serving as a leader in Emory’s student government association during the Sept. 11 attacks. He saw a role for student leaders to help shape the university’s response and help students whose families were affected.
“We put ourselves in the room,” he said. “It was a transformational moment. It imprinted upon me that public service was going to be something that I did in my life.”
After graduating, Bornstein served as a hall director and conduct officer at the university before pursuing his master’s in public administration with a focus on disaster management from Georgia State University. During his program, he was selected as a Presidential Management Fellow and interned in the CDC’s safety and security office. Twenty-plus years later, he would return to the same office as its director.
Over the course of his career, Bornstein has worked to protect the people working behind the scenes and federal agencies from external threats in order to carry out their mission.
He led the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) homeland security programs and services to defend the U.S.’s food and agricultural systems. He worked with domestic and international partners to protect critical infrastructure, and he worked on biosurveillance and bioterrorism projects to protect the U.S. food supply.
At the CDC, he led the planning and implementation of the public health agency’s internal pandemic response, protecting its workforce as employees responded to COVID-19. He also served as the CDC’s representative on the White House Safer Federal Workforce Task Force.
At FEMA, Bornstein oversaw the agency’s security programs, which included designing physical and personnel security, counterintelligence operations, fraud prevention and security trainings. During Hurricane Helene in 2024, Bornstein worked closely with North Carolina’s governor and state and local governments to provide a safe and secure environment for FEMA employees as they partnered with local, impacted communities.
“When I look across my entire career from agriculture to CDC to FEMA and what I hope to bring to Georgetown, I’m most proud of being able to lift up teams and build teams and promote people,” he said. “I’ve gotten to invest in and mentor other people and help build systems that will last much longer than I am there.”
Public Safety at Georgetown
For Bornstein, working at Georgetown feels like a full-circle moment to his early career days at Emory.
“I felt the passion, and to do this type of work that I’ve grown to love at Georgetown is a win-win- win. It’s like hitting all three on the slot machine,” he said.
Just as in his previous positions, Bornstein said he feels drawn to help protect the Georgetown community as they carry out its mission.
“The mission of FEMA and CDC and the USDA doesn’t happen without security and safety,” he said. “That’s how I take my job at Georgetown as well. The university was not founded to advance safety and security. It was founded to be curious and create knowledge and do good in the world. My job is to make sure that can happen.”
Bornstein plans to focus on bringing different public safety offices, operations and services together under one umbrella, applying best practices across campuses and leveraging systems to improve community members’ lives. He said he looks forward to meeting with students, faculty and staff to learn their safety concerns.
“We can develop mitigations and strategies to help not just increase security but increase their perception of security,” he said. “Because if people are safe and secure but they don’t feel that way, it doesn’t matter. We have to make them feel as safe and secure as they are.”
