DC's Leading CIOs and CTOs

What makes the region's leading CIOs and CTOs tick? Find out in this slideshow.

Big thanks to our partners on this project: Eastern Foundry, CWPS and Cabot Consultants.

David's role at the FCC is 80% digital diplomat, encouraging collaboration across bureaus and with other stakeholders in the public and private sector. The other 20% is championing the team to help transform the agency, which was 15 years behind the times when David became CIO in August 2013. The IT team is 375 people, with the majority representing contractors. They're working on moving all FCC IT services at headquarters to a managed service provider and the cloud.

Career milestones: Worked on Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program at CDC before and after 9/11; pursued a PhD focused on how to improve the response of public- and private-sector organizations to disruptive events; volunteered to deploy to Afghanistan as a civilian (pictured on the far right) to help US and NATO think differently; served as executive director for a national commission reviewing the R&D efforts of the US intel community.

Interesting facts: Worked for government at age 15 at a Department of Energy facility and received security clearance at age 17; did televised research in the Sea of Cortez with Dr. Robert Ballard, who discovered the Titanic; built a computer simulation of the spread of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, volunteered as a health correspondent in South Africa, met Desmond Tutu and later taught HIV-AIDS education in the township of Khayelitsha.

Reston-based comScore analyzes trends in the digital world (1.6 trillion interactions each month) for enterprises, publishers and network operators worldwide. As CTO, Mike leads a 325-person team responsible for the architecture, design, development and operations of the company's tech efforts. He became CTO three years ago and helped launch comScore in 1999. In the early days, it took over two days to produce comScore's monthly data. After radical improvements using distributed processing, the data is now available in under an hour. The Proof of Concept created to see if the new approach worked was built on an airplane during two cross-country flights, says Mike. Now the team is working on a new approach to digital measurement.

Career milestones: Awarded first US patent while at comScore; built a team that created a business on a single idea, eventually leading to an IPO; and giving a keynote to a large audience that was also transmitted live around the globe.

Interesting facts: Loves to cook for family; born in a small town called Shamokin, PA; worked his way through undergrad and grad schools; worked on a project for the German Railway (Deutsche Bahn) in Frankfurt; and was hired by IBM at age 19.

RainKing provides sales and marketing intel on hundreds of thousands of tech and marketing buyers in North America and Europe through a SaaS application. Dennis has been with RainKing for a little over a year, overseeing a team of 20, and has been in the IT industry for over 25 years. Shortly after joining the company, he took on a project to develop the next generation of RainKing’s sales and marketing intelligence SaaS solution that was already two years behind schedule. Three months later the product was completed, customers have been moved over, and the old platform was retired. Now the team is working on a Salesforce native integration so that customers can use their Salesforce platform to access RainKing’s intel database.

Career milestones: Managing large globally-diverse organizations; getting a seat at the exec table; and running a $4M P&L.

Interesting facts: He grew up near Boston and is a diehard Patriots fan; he came to DC for a CTO job at CQ Roll Call six years ago; he’s a private pilot and has flown to Florida and Wisconsin; he attended the White House Correspondents dinner and sat at a table with Tim Daly and David Arquette.

Derrick joined Harmony, which develops tech solutions for human services organizations, in 2007. He’s in charge of R&D, technical SaaS operations, and professional services, and oversees about 100 people in the US, Toronto, Serbia, and India. One of his most memorable projects was a major upgrade last year of Harmony’s SaaS Health and Human services application platform. The project involved a full tech refresh of the company’s application technology stack and migration of about 500 of its state and local government customers. Now the team is working on a major data center consolidation.

Career milestones: Being nominated a top CTO; participating in two successful equity events with venture-backed companies; and co-inventing an approved US patent for Linguistic Pattern Matching.

Interesting facts: He’s the youngest in a family of nine and has eight older sisters; he drives a 1994 Toyota Land Cruiser with nearly 400,000 miles; he enjoys golf, professional football, and despite being a native of southern Maryland, he roots for the Cincinnati Bengals fan and not the Ravens or Redskins.

Kit Check has developed a product that combines RFID technology with cloud software to track the flow of drugs from the hospital pharmacy to the operating room and to the patient. It also integrates with electronic medical records systems, allowing doctors to document drug administrations, and automating the reconciliation of controlled substances. Colin is responsible for building the company's product suite. He’s been on the job a little over a year and oversees a growing team of engineers – from a handful to around 20 in the last 18 months. He’s worked on several memorable projects in his career, from split key cryptography to using sensors to analyze the social and physiological behavior of patients in assisted living facilities.

Career milestones: CTO at four companies and built a wide range of successful software products.

Interesting facts: Grew up in Mumbai, India, and got grad degree in computer science from Virginia Tech; likes hiking and traveling; also enjoys history, art, and music; and recently went with his wife to Vienna, Salzburg and Prague.

Ken’s federal service spans 31 years, working for agencies like DOD, Census, Commerce, and the Interior. He’s been ADIR/CIO of the US Fish & Wildlife for the past five. He has IT directive oversight for over 170 federal employees across eight regional offices and HQ, including about 9,000 client users within FWS. One of his most memorable tech projects was adopting Patterson Elementary School in SE Washington and coordinating, rewiring, providing equipment and IT volunteer resources, web development, and training to students. He also worked directly with Secretary Daley to provide government-furnished desktops to disadvantaged local schools in the DC metro area. One of his current projects is providing virtual desktop applications like secure desktop cloud video solutions to FWS employees.

Career milestones: Started as a Navy COOP Engineering student, working in R&D division, Robotics and Electronics at the Explosive Ordnance Technology Center; worked his way up federal civil service from GS-2 to senior executive service; and working with many cabinet secretaries and under secretaries on highly-visible, economic-related projects, and new services.

Interesting facts: Born in Germany (military brat) and lived in several places, including Hawaii, Kansas, North Carolina, and DC; hobbies include motor boating, catamaran sailing, and traveling; most interesting place visited was the green sand beaches of the Big Island, Hawaii, and Cuenca, Ecuador; met Jack Lord from the original Hawaii Five-O and was an extra in 1972; and bucket list includes more European travel, and visiting the Arctic and South America.

John became USPTO's CIO in December 2008 and oversees 500 IT people. The team is working on a unified web-based application built with modern components that will let examiners work in a holistic environment. The agency just relaunched its website, and it allows people to easily search and get electronic access to patents, rather than ordering paper copies. Trademarks can also now get reassigned through the website. John says one of his most memorable projects was supporting a group of DevOps enthusiasts at USPTO or “Devops Doers” as he calls them. The grassroots group helped USPTO make progress in adopting DevOps and has driven up efficiencies.

Career milestones: Started as software engineer and became a system architect before joining management; managed software releases for AOL to over 32 million simultaneous customers worldwide; and stabilizing the USPTO IT infrastructure and overseeing rebuild of the systems that help strengthen global patent and trademark systems.

Interesting facts: He's originally from Rome, NY; in his spare time he makes furniture for his home; he's done major renovations of his home with his own hands; and he's a huge fan of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and strategy board games.

Josh oversees a team of 45 at DC-based Optoro. The company's tech products help retailers process and manage excess inventory. One of his most memorable projects was relaunching Blinq two years ago. The platform helps consumers buy excess retail products at discounted rates. The first version was built in one month by one person, but the relaunch took about six months with several tech experts focused on customer experience and design. Now Josh and his team are working on a system that allows retailers to make better decisions on whether certain inventory needs to be returned to the manufacturer.

Career milestones: Being involved in raising venture funding for Optoro and having in depth conversations with VCs about its tech; getting to a big enough organization to have to introduce layers of management; and starting first IT consulting company while a teen.

Interesting facts: Grew up in Bowie, MD, and went to Suitland HS; studied music composition and computer science at the University of Maryland; got kicked out of college for never going to class (tech classes couldn't teach him anything he didn't already know); he was a bassoonist for the DC Youth Orchestra; and he organizes at least three tech-focused meetups a month.

Rob has been CIO of Freddie Mac since October 2010, overseeing 1,400 people. His team deploys a few hundreds projects a year but one of his most memorable was an upgrade to Peoplesoft Financials from an older, highly customized version. With fewer customizations, the organization is able to quickly and easily update the system with patches. The team is now building a platform for the industry that allows loans to be securitized in a standard way on a single platform.

Career milestones: Building first system—an options trading system for a firm on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange; managing first team; and dealing with the first crisis.

Interesting facts: Grew up in Philly and still lives there; came to Freddie Mac because of financial crisis; has two daughters (ages 12 and 14), who made it to their respective basketball league championships; and is a first generation American—father was born in what is now the Slovak Republic.

CEB advises over 21,000 senior leaders from over 10,000 organizations on how to respond to business conditions and transform operations. As CIO for the last 13 years, overseeing over 400 people, Price works with tech teams worldwide, as well as CEB's publishing and research support teams. Price says one of his most memorable projects was recently building out CEB's apps dev capability in Chennai, India. The team supplements other teams in the US and UK. Now CEB's tech operation is testing new technologies for data analytics and visualization.

Career milestones: Being part of a turnaround as country manager in Sao Paulo, Brazil; and building a factory automation capability—the company was able to sell the methodology behind it over and over again.

Interesting facts: One early job was creating code for Aegis Cruisers and Destroyers; had a pet horse as a child that lived for 30 years—also taught it to fetch and count; volunteered in Mali, West Africa, creating medical tracking systems while inoculating children age 3 and younger; and visiting Antarctica is on his bucket list.

OutMarket is the marketing automation company that grew out of Vocus, where Mark was CTO for six years. He joined Vocus in 1998 and became CTO 10 years later. One of his most memorable projects was in 1999, when client/server computing was still the tech of choice for enterprise applications and the web was in its infancy. Vocus was getting ready to release a new version of its client/server product, when a lengthy (until 2am) conversation resulted in the company going to a full web version and dumping the almost-ready client/server product. Vocus was one of the earliest SaaS applications on the market and it made a huge impact on Vocus' success, he says.

Career milestones: Founded a company at age 20 that developed one of the first Point-Of-Sale applications for Windows; served as CTO of a growing public company in 1998; chief architect of a product that grew a company from $2M in revenue to $200M, took it public, and was sold for $450M.

Interesting facts: Born in England; grew up in Canada; came to DC to work for Vocus in 1998 on a three-year visa; thought it would be a fun experience to live in the US for a couple of years—17 years later, he's still here.

Dawn has been DOL's CIO since August 2014 after serving as deputy CIO for nearly two years. Her office has about 107 federal staff, with most of its IT services outsourced or supported by contractors. Dawn says one of her most memorable projects was working on the NASA Observing System Data Information System as a private-sector program manager. (The system manages NASA's earth science data coming from satellites, aircraft, field measurements, and other programs.) The project was complex in terms of technology, data volume, and the variety of science applications at the time, Dawn says. A current project is DOL's Digital Government Integrated Platform, which will provide the tech needed for mobile computing and data sharing for the agency's mission systems.

Career milestones: Serving as DOL's CIO; also working as CTO at the Smithsonian; and her first overall IT management position as director for the Westinghouse (Northrop Grumman) Oceanic Sonar and Anti-submarine Warfare division.

Interesting facts: Grew up in Maryland and enjoys sailing; lost fear of public speaking while working for a few years at the NIST Information Technology Lab; leadership role models are Theodore Roosevelt, Colin Powell, and grandfather, William Hasse; enjoys remodeling and has her own power tool collection; and bucket list includes visiting all US federal parks.

Gurpreet doesn't hold a CTO or CIO title like everyone else on our list but he's the brains behind TalkLocal's technology. (The company connects consumers with consumer-rated service providers like plumbers and electricians through its mobile and desktop app.) Gurpreet co-launched the company in late 2011 and manages its tech infrastructure stack while setting the strategic vision. One of his most memorable projects was building the initial demo for TalkLocal. It took months of long, eye-straining days but Gurpreet says it also gave him a personal sense of passion and fulfillment. He's now working on making the experience of real-time call-matching ubiquitous.

Career milestones: Growing Geeks-On-Site to 10,000 clients in the DC region and, through the experience, finding the inspiration to launch TalkLocal; helping to raise $40k in 10 minutes for a nonprofit called SikhHelpLine; and taking TalkLocal from basement startup to web service and an iPhone and Android app that's served over 1 million calls nationwide in 50 service categories.

Interesting facts: He's rebuilding his body (an example of complex engineering) through a healthier, more active lifestyle; he's been to over two dozen countries, including Kenya, China and India; he's a movie buff and needs the whole experience every week or so of going to opening night, in the theater, high-def screen, and even better with 3D glasses and D-BOX theater seats.

Gil has been part of the Noblis senior exec leadership team since the company's launch in 1996. He's been CTO for the last eight years, overseeing all science and tech capabilities. (Noblis is a nonprofit science, tech and strategy organization.) Gil also oversees Noblis' internal research program, the Noblis Innovation and Collaboration Center, the Center for Applied High Performance Computing, and its speaker series, Technology Tuesdays. Gil has spent the last three years building the CAHPC in Danville, VA. It's solving big data problems in genomic analysis, fraud detection, transportation congestion, dark web analytics, and equity markets analysis. The center has helped build a tech-based economy in southern Virginia.

Career milestones: Worked on first-ever system architecture for the FAA's National Airspace System in the ‘80s; helped execute telecom deregulation by radically changing the way the federal government bought telecommunications services in the ‘90s; and bringing supercomputers to Danville to create a symbol of local revitalization, a new approach to genomic analysis, and kick-start personalized medicine.

Interesting facts: Born and raised in Baltimore; came to DC for a co-op position at the FAA; loves nature and wildlife photography and hopes to photograph grandchildren's college graduations; has been to the Vatican Necropolis and Yosemite National Park; and has met several famous people, including Johnny Unitas, Brooks Robinson, Edward Teller, Leonid Brezhnev, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and Clarence D. Long.

Scott's role at SoundExchange, an independent nonprofit that collects and distributes digital performance royalties to featured artists and copyright holders, is building and managing databases, software, systems, network infrastructure, and managing all tech projects. He's been in the role four years and oversees nearly 60 employees and consultants. His team is re-architecting and rebuilding the company's enterprise Royalty Administration software platform to support the growing business. The organization is also shifting to the cloud and open source technologies.

Career milestones: Being CTO at SoundExchange and building the platform to enable and accelerate growth; helping build and launch a startup that created a new category of online investing; and seeing people he hired and mentored as young programmers and analysts grow to senior and executive positions.

Interesting facts: His college hobby of DJ-ing at parties came full circle when last weekend, he DJ'd a party for a bunch of 6-year-olds; he's visited China twice; his chocolate Lab introduced him to his wife during walks at a park; he's a passionate Notre Dame Fighting Irish fan; and he loves live music.

Pete leads four divisions at the University of Maryland University College and oversees about 300 employees and contract staff. One of his most memorable projects was modernizing the university's approach to tech by redesigning the Office of Information Technology, creating the Office of Analytics and Enterprise Program Management, and building a customer service team. Several university data centers were also moved to the cloud. Now the team is working on the first phase of replacing UMUC's legacy ERP platform (the last to be fully modernized) with a cloud SaaS solution.

Career milestones: Designing, engineering and building the first multi-protocol TCP/IP-based regional data communications network for Ameritech in the late '80s; helping MedImmune grow from 60 employees to over 2,000 and $1.5B in revenue, and then being acquired by AstraZeneca while leading the IT organization and becoming its first CIO; and leading UMUC's tech migration from a first-generation, proprietary learning platform to a contemporary, cloud-based computing solution.

Interesting facts: Had the same chemistry teacher as his father; married 26 years and has three children; training for his first ultra distance trail race (50K); serves on the board for four nonprofits; was selected for the 1984 Junior Olympic baseball team; and participates in several relay, adventure and other team events with friends each year.

AddThis' marketing insights and web personalization tools are used by millions of websites, and Matt is responsible for the technology behind that platform. He's been CTO for over a year and oversees about 40 people. Matt says one of his most memorable projects was several years ago when his team built the infrastructure and software needed to ingest analytics data in real time. The Skyfall project spans two data centers, handles over 4 billion events per day, and is made available to internal servers in near real time. Now the team is working on getting a large percentage of AddThis' applications running inside containers, which Matt says is the future of enterprise computing.

Career milestones: Graduating from GE R&D's software technology program and earning a master's in electrical and computer engineering from RPI; getting promoted to VP and chief architect of Quantum Retail; and getting promoted to CTO of AddThis, which served over 1 trillion page views in 2013.

Interesting facts: He spent a year commuting from DC to London every other week and is now officially jet lag immune; he once jumped off a gondola in the Swiss Alps; he has a beautiful wife and wonderful son; and he still holds the 8-and-under swim record for 25-meter freestyle at his community pool.

Jonas, who leads about 75 people at Virtustream, has been responsible for continuous operation and growth of Virtustream's multi-tenanted Infrastructure-as-a-Service for the last year. One of his most memorable projects was at Blackboard, where he led the data center consolidation of various global co-location providers. It returned $5M in annual operating savings, a reduction of 32 co-location centers to 10 over three years, and streamlined operations.

Career milestones: Transitioned career from accounting and finance to technology; served as key contributor to Blackboard's Managed Hosting business from startup to public company; and mentored and supported individual contributors into successful leaders and business owners.

Interesting facts: Grew up on the Jersey Shore on property President James Garfield died on; moved to DC to join a young tech startup called Blackboard and stayed over 15 years; has two young sons (9 and 11); has attended many championship sporting events, including the Super Bowl, World Series, Masters and NCAA finals; and trained and certified on airplane evacuation procedures.

John (above right) oversees a tech team of 125, in charge of the association's publishing, society programs and administrative technologies. The portfolio of technologies support an organization (over 161,000 members; 47 journals) whose revenues are overwhelmingly digital. He's been in the role nine years and in that time developed a system that automated the composition of scholarly research articles for publication. It saved money, allowed for faster publication and created more author loyalty.

Career milestones: Developing great teams and watching team members assume tech leadership roles in other organizations; and working on a project that connected AARP's customer database with major member benefit providers.

Interesting facts: Enjoys backpacking in remote wilderness areas; moved frequently as a child—lived in France, Germany, Turkey and Canada; and bucket list includes visiting China, backpacking in the Wind River Mountain Range in Colorado and rafting down the Grand Canyon.

Elizabeth (wearing red) has been AES' tech guru for over six years, overseeing 100 people. The global power company owns and operates electricity generation and distribution businesses, including coal, diesel, hydropower, gas, oil, wind and biomass. One of her most memorable projects was leading the redesign of AES' outdated HQ in Arlington. The effort involved getting feedback from 300 people, learning design and construction, and calming any anxiety from colleagues. She was recently assigned to the new energy and solutions group and scaling new technologies in solar power.

Career milestones: Having a relevant career after 35 years; becoming a leader for the first time in 1988 at EDS after working at the company 10 years; becoming CIO and being able to move across different industries with that same title.

Interesting facts: She was born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island; came to DC in the mid-'80s on a business trip, fell in love with the city, and quit her job to move here; her bucket list includes a world cruise and cooking classes in Italy; she's an avid traveler and her favorite city is Abu Dhabi; and the most famous person she's ever met is King Abdullah of Jordan.

Deb spent eight years as CTO of CACI, but she recently “semi” retired to work with educational institutions (GMU Volgenau School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins Whiting School and Tufts Engineering), serve on SAIC's board and hopefully increase the number of senior tech women on boards, and advise and invest in tech startups. So far her portfolio includes a cybersecurity company, and she's evaluating other candidates. One big focus area as CACI's CTO was rolling out mobility security programs and specialized solutions for government and commercial use. She also worked for the DOD and intel community, focused on IT and security.

Career milestones: Moving from defense into the commercial sector for a job with Oracle; transitioning back into government, then returning to the private sector as CTO of CACI; and now the role as adviser and board member.

Interesting facts: Used to teach horseback riding; grew up an avid sailor in suburban NY; loves to hike; and has a rock collection of over 500 rocks from the places she's visited all over the world.

Mohamoud oversees all IT at HHMI, a biomedical research institute focused on medical discoveries. That includes its Chevy Chase HQ, data centers in Ashburn and Chevy Chase, its R&D facility in Ashburn, and the over 500 university-based research labs throughout the country. He’s just getting started on an ERP replacement, and has been focused lately on innovating the use of data and analytics. He’s also managing infrastructure and high-performance computing clusters for HHMI’s labs in Ashburn. He also spends time building and training high-performance teams, since nearly all of HHMI’s IT work is done in-house.

Career milestones: Shifting from working as a mechanical engineer to IT management; diversifying his work experience from heavy industry manufacturing companies (Thermo King) to global philanthropy (Ford Foundation) and then biomedical research (HHMI).

Interesting facts: He was born and raised in Somalia until age 16 when he came to the US; as an immigrant child, he faced cultural and family pressure to be an engineer or doctor; his wife is also a tech exec, but the couple stays away from talking tech at home; he loves books and traveling with his wife and three kids to exotic destinations – he can be dropped in any city and feel right at home.