I love being a computer scientist, product builder, teacher, and founder. My adventures span the private, academic, non-profit, venture, and public sectors, with a love for developing products, building and leading teams, data, healthcare, and weaving the public interest into all aspects of life. My first programming language was Pascal (then Scheme!), first AI research was with Braitenberg Vehicles (aka little baby Agents) over 20 years ago, and first sentiment analysis engine earned the U.S. first place in a global tech competition.
I am currently a Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer on Product Management at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government; founder and Co-Chief Curator of the U.S. Digital Service Origins; Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Workday; and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. I previously served as a Fellow at the MIT Media Lab, where my team founded ai-in-the-loop, and as Senior Advisor and Fellow at Mozilla, where I co-founded and co-led the Responsible Computer Science Challenge and the Mozilla Builders Incubator (now Mozilla Ventures). I also founded and lead Product and Society, as well as the Ethical Tech Working Group at Harvard and the Ethical Tech Collective.
In 2024, I was honored with the Abie Award for Technical Leadership, joining past recipients such as Drs. Fei-Fei Li, Daphne Koller, Lisa Su, Margaret Burnett, and Nuria Oliver.
In public service, I was appointed the inaugural Executive Director of the National AI Advisory Committee and previously served as Deputy Chief Technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, where I helped lay the foundation for the agency’s first Office of Technology. I was also a founding product and engineering member of the United States Digital Service (USDS), a tech startup within the White House, where I led and contributed to efforts across the Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Defense, and the Precision Medicine Initiative—helping to improve services and care for people across the country.
Earlier in my career, I held roles in software engineering, product management, and data science at Google, IBM, and Harris Healthcare.
I’ve founded several initiatives, including Google’s first Internal Business Intelligence Summit, Atlanta United For Sight, and the Cancer Sidekick Foundation. I placed first in the Imagine Cup U.S. competition with a sentiment analysis engine, spoke at the White House’s State of STEM event in 2015, and was invited as First Lady Michelle Obama’s guest to the 2015 State of the Union for my work in healthcare, veterans affairs, and public service.
Outside of work, I’ve competed in the After Hours Gaming League finals for StarCraft II, spoken at tech conferences worldwide, and hosted food-themed Formula 1 racing hangouts.
I proudly hold undergraduate and graduate degrees in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia and Supélec in Metz, France.
