Navigating the Government Maze with Empathy and Innovation as a Public Servant

Session Overview:

Are you looking to make a meaningful impact in both the public and private sectors but having challenges navigating the industry maze. It’s time to learn effective strategies for entering government roles while maintaining empathy and innovation in navigating bureaucracy.

Join us for a fireside chat where you'll hear from government tech leaders and learn how to position yourself for roles across public and private sectors in the government.

These change-makers will share effective strategies on how they have led with empathy while not accepting the status quo. Navigating Government and Beyond while empowering your career journey as a public servant in tech. 

Register today!

Learn more about Systers in Government and meet the leaders on Discord

Speaker Bios: 

Carolyn Rowland is a supervisory computer scientist at NIST in the Engineering Laboratory (EL). She serves as an Information System Security Officer (ISSO) for EL and manages a group of research software engineers and IT operations staff. She and her group specialize in working with researchers to solve problems relating to research data, technologies, tools, platforms, and cybersecurity. Carolyn has spent her career at NIST starting in a technical role as a Unix system administrator. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Michigan Technological University in the great frozen north of Michigan.

Ayushi Roy is a technologist, writer, lecturer, and government implementation expert. She is currently the Deputy Director of the New Practice Lab at New America, whose work ranges from authoring an independent assessment of the IRS Direct File system for Congress, to streamlining the grants infrastructure for Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) which provides healthcare for more than 70 million Americans including 9 million children. She teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School, has been published in publications like The Washington Post and CNBC, and is an alumna of Columbia University and MIT.

Kathy Pham is a computer scientist and product leader across industry, academia, non-profits, venture capital, and government. She is Vice President, Artificial Intelligence at Workday, and is the Workday AI Ambassador.  She is a Senior Advisor at Mozilla where she co-founded the Mozilla Builders Incubator and Mozilla Responsible Computing. She is on Faculty at Harvard where she created and teaches Product Management and Society and co-founded the Ethical Tech Working Group.

Most recently, Kathy was appointed the inaugural Executive Director of the National AI Advisory Committee, led as the Deputy Chief Technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, and was a founding Engineering and Product member of the U.S. Digital Service at the White House where she helped build critical digital services in government across three presidential administrations.

She was a Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative. She also serves on various tech and non-profit boards and has a love for coaching grade school soccer.

Prior, Kathy has spent over a decade building large scale systems in industry and healthcare at Google (Search, Health, People Operations), IBM, and Harris Healthcare.  Kathy completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, Georgia) and Supelec in (Metz, France)

Sparkle Meadows is a product leader at Google driving development on Chrome's Web Platform to create globally scalable products that empower developers and improve the experience of browsing the web for people worldwide.   With a background in product, engineering, and healthcare, Sparkle has worked both in the private sector, with notable companies including Facebook, and the public sector, where her last role was as the Director of Product for the United States Digital Service (USDS). During her four years at USDS, Sparkle served under two consecutive presidential administrations and worked closely with a number of different agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  Sparkle graduated from Stanford University with a BS in Bio Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Political Science.

Natalie Moore is a product expert and advocate for using technology to drive social impact. She currently leads a team of technologists at the U.S. Digital Service who are supporting the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP). In collaboration with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), Natalie has been instrumental in modernizing the refugee program to make it more efficient and scalable. She also helped launch a new resettlement pathway which allows Americans to sponsor refugees, the first of its kind. 

Previously, Natalie served as the Customer Experience & Delivery Lead at the Department of Agriculture (Food & Nutrition Service) where she worked to expand access to the SNAP food program. Her career also includes leading technology teams at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. 

Prior to government, Natalie was the product owner for National Public Radio's largest priority, NPR.org and was a Senior Product Manager on the Biden for President 2020 campaign.

Natalie was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Burkina Faso. She currently mentors youth in foster care through the Best Kids organization and was an early advisory board member for Coding it Forward. She holds a B.A. in International Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Merici Vinton is a government leader who specializes in digital government transformation and launching nationwide, high-profile initiatives. Merici currently serves as Senior Advisor for Digital Delivery to IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel. Merici was Direct File's Deputy, sitting across all aspects of launching the new tax filing service to the American public in 2024. Prior to Direct File, Merici was the Child Tax Credit Implementation Lead for the US Digital Service.

Merici is also the Co-Founder and former CEO of Ada’s List, a global community of womxn and non-binary people who work in technology. Ada's List was sold to TechLadies in 2022.

Merici was one of the first employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and set up the digital team. She worked with now-Senator Elizabeth Warren to develop the technology strategy for the agency. She strongly steered the strategy towards one of openness from the get go, building the agency on foundations of open source, open data and transparency. Their trailblazing vision set the standard for modern web services in the federal government. 

Merici has extensive consulting experience gained while living in London for 9 years, including working at IDEO and Fjord as a Director where she helped clients transition from paper-based, siloed organizations through to identifying and launching new digital services based on user research.

Merici lives on Capitol Hill in DC with her husband and 2 kids.