PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Chief Information Officer & Chief AI Officer (SES) July 2020 – Present
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) | Washington, DC

  • Lead Office of Information Technology Management: cybersecurity, application development, AI, data governance, enterprise architecture, infrastructure, IT support, privacy, and COOP
  • Advanced cybersecurity posture from “Ad Hoc” to “Managed & Measurable”; implemented SOC and Zero Trust architecture (Okta, Intune, Zscaler)
  • Designed agentic AI framework with RAG + LLM fine-tuning for financial decision-support; first of kind at a federal cultural agency
  • Designing semantic search with vector embeddings across NEA’s grants management systems
  • Led multi-cloud migration across Azure and AWS; implemented Microsoft Copilot, DocuSign, and Xacta
  • Chair, AI & Data Governance Boards; authored NEA IRM Strategic Plans FY22 and FY26
  • Member, Federal Chief AI Officer (CAIO) Council — interagency body coordinating federal AI strategy, policy, and governance across the executive branch
  • Member, Federal Chief Information Officer Council (ex officio, NEA CIO)
  • Introduced vibe coding and AI-assisted rapid prototyping practices to federal development teams

Founder & Principal Advisor November 2025 – Present
Gradient Descent LLC | Washington, DC Metro Area | gradientdescent.biz

  • AI consulting and advisory practice focused on agentic AI, responsible AI governance, and applied ML for enterprise and public sector clients
  • Forbes Technology Council contributor; published thought leadership on AI governance, agentic systems, and federal AI strategy

CIO & Chief Digital Officer (SES) January 2017 – July 2020
Voice of America (VOA) | USAGM | Washington, DC

  • Managed 250+ staff and $200M+ technology budget serving 275M+ weekly viewers across 47 languages globally
  • Built Ipsum NLP auto-transcription/translation tool achieving 10x speed improvement; adopted by 4 global media organizations
  • Launched VOA+ OTT streaming platform; deployed 20+ language-specific mobile apps with circumvention technology
  • Implemented AI recommendation engine in CMS; migrated 400+ TB to cloud enterprise Data Lake
  • Established and led USAGM CIO Council overseeing technology for 5 international broadcasting organizations; deployed camera robotics, drone program, 360° immersive news, and Alexa Skills for 12 language streams

Chief Technology Officer (GS-15) October 2015 – January 2017
USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) | Washington, DC

  • Led $100M+ technology modernization program; introduced Agile/DevOps across FSIS engineering organization
  • Re-engineered Whole Genome Sequencing infrastructure via cloud shared service with FDA & CDC: $12M/yr in cost savings
  • Established and chaired USDA CTO Council, overseeing technology decisions for 18 agencies and directing $1B+ budget

Chief of Digital Innovation & Development (GS-15) April 2013 – October 2015
DHS U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) | Washington, DC

  • Led first federal agency hackathon; built digital innovation program and implemented DevOps creating cross-functional development teams
  • Moved USCIS from traditional data centers to the AWS cloud
  • Introduced human-centered design and agile product development to a 20,000-person federal agency
  • Brought development cycle time down from years to months for new development, and from months to minutes for operations and maintenance