Hi!

I create software and data platforms for causes I care about, like climate justice.

I build teams that go from zero to one: turning big ideas into reliable products people love to use.

Working together

Reducing the injustice of the climate crisis has been my lifelong passion. Although I often consult on projects for causes I care about, I’m not accepting new clients at this time.

Background

I’m currently helping lead the SimplerGrants initiative at Health and Human Services (HHS), which works to simplify the federal grantmaking process for HHS and the entire federal government. As the Chief Innovation Officer at the Office of Grants, I lead our effort building simpler.grants.gov to deliver a federal grantmaking experience that's more accessible to all communities, especially communities that have been particularly underserved by the challenging and overwhelming federal grantmaking process. Grants.gov currently hosts 10 million annual users and processes a historical average of $300 billion of grants per year (or $2.4 million per minute of the business week!). The Simpler Grants.gov project is 100% open-source and our roadmaps are fully transparent and participatory.

I also supervise our contractor teams working on the SimplerNOFOs (Simpler Notice of Funding Opportunities) initiative, where we’ve hired a small army of writers, editors, and coaches to vastly simplify our grant announcements. Through plain language, our work has saved 15 hours per applicant in the initial pilot, and we’ve now simplified hundreds of federal grant announcements.

For this work, I received a 2025 Federal 100 award from GovExec as one of the 100 most successful innovators in federal IT projects.

Prior to this work, I was the Senior Advisor for Justice40 at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The Justice40 initiative directs 40% of the benefits from federal spending related to climate and the environment to historically overburdened and underserved communities. Federal, state, and local governments have repeatedly and intentionally contributed to the unjust distribution of pollution burden and health hazards into communities of color and low-income communities. The Justice40 initiative is one step towards redressing those ongoing inequities and enabling a just transition during the climate crisis. As part of the project, we built a fully open-source mapping tool to identify historically overburdened and underserved communities, informed and guided by community stakeholder engagement processes.

As the Staff Software Engineer at Myst AI, I served as the lead engineer and the acting manager of the engineering team. Myst is a startup that uses machine learning to help energy companies better predict the future, increase renewable energy adoption, and reduce carbon emissions.

From January 2016 until March 2018, I served at the US Digital Service in the White House. Formed in the aftermath of the disastrous healthcare.gov launch, USDS brings private sector tech expertise to high-stakes federal projects.

As the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Quality Payment Program at Medicare, I helped build and lead a team of over 200 people creating a software platform that delivers $178 billion in incentives for high-quality care. We delivered on time and dramatically under-budget, moved all infrastructure to AWS, maintained 100% uptime, built an intuitive and secure user interface, deployed several releases daily, and supported hundreds of vendors submitting millions of API requests.

During two years of government service, I was named one of the 100 most important people in federal health IT and one of the 15 “Disruptors of the Year” in the $86 billion federal software industry.

Prior to the White House, I was Senior Data Scientist at RedOwl Analytics from 2013 until 2015, where I designed and built statistical software for analyzing the massive digital trail created by large modern firms. RedOwl was named “Most Innovative Company” at the 30,000-person RSA Conference.

In 2012 I served as a Senior Data Scientist for President Obama’s re-election campaign, where I helped create an innovative web app used by senior staff to visualize and analyze all of the campaign’s most sensitive data, including advertising, polling, and voter contact.

I completed my PhD at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and my research building statistical models of how consumers adopt new clean energy technologies won both of the Department’s highest awards.

As a side project, I cofounded a small solar analytics company that won a $25,000 prize from the Department of Energy. My environmental work in undergrad was featured on the front page of The New York Times.

I live near where I grew up in rural Virginia, and I prefer to work remotely.