California names former 18F official as chief technology officer
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday appointed Ayushi Roy, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School and a former federal official, as the state’s next chief technology officer.
Roy, a San Francisco resident, has for the past four years served as chief program officer at the New Practice Lab, a division of the think tank New America, that aims to improve the economic security of families. In that role, she has for the past four years researched and designed IT systems used to administer public benefits.
She served as director of state and local technology at 18F, the General Services Administration’s former digital services agency, which helped other agencies modernize their technology and digital services. After the office shut down last March, as part of the the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce, Roy became a senior adviser for the Technology Modernization Fund at the General Services Administration and the White House Office of Management and Budget, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Roy’s appointment comes at a period of transition for California’s technology leadership. Jonathan Porat, the state’s previous CTO, stepped down in April after nearly three-and-a-half years with the Department of Technology; he later joined the civic tech nonprofit Code for America as its CTO.
Roy will join a department led by Chief Information Officer Christopher Given, who was appointed in April following the retirement of former state CIO Liana Bailey-Crimmins. Given identified legacy-system modernization, digital identity and artificial intelligence as early priorities for the department.
“We’re fundamentally a department in service of the missions of literally every single department in the state, so we have to be ruthless about how we’re assessing how well we’re serving the state,” Given said in an interview in June.
Roy holds a master’s degree in urban studies and planning from MIT and a bachelor’s degree in human rights and Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies from Columbia University.
