Full Bio:

Marina (Martin) Nitze (pronounced NITS-uh), co-author of the books Crisis Engineering and Hack Your Bureaucracy, is currently focused on improving America's child welfare system, while also helping organizations solve mission-critical IT challenges. She was previously the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (2013-2017), helped found the United States Digital Service, and served as a Senior Advisor on technology in the White House under the Obama Administration.

She is a partner in the crisis engineering firm Layer Aleph, which restores complex systems to service and helps organizations emerge stronger from existential crises. If your business is suffering an outage or inability to make changes safely, Layer Aleph can help.

Marina currently works with states to surface and scale promising practices in foster care, in order to keep at-risk kids safe and safely reduce time spent in foster care. Marina is able to do much of this work thanks to the New Practice Lab at New America, where she is currently a Fellow. She is also proud to be a Senior Fellow at Think of Us and the Policy Entrepreneurs Network. Marina has been an active volunteer Court-Appointed Special Advocate for at-risk foster youth for over 20 years.

Marina also created TaskTackler, a productivity app designed specifically for Type-A personalities.

Marina serves on the board of directors at Renaissance Philanthropy, and on the advisory boards for the Center for Public Sector AI, Foster America, and Think of Us.

Earlier in her career, Marina was the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs from 2013 to 2017, where she built the first agency United States Digital Service team, bringing in America’s top technical talent for tours of duty within the agency to help transform how America serves and honors its Veterans. Her portfolio included vets.gov, a single digital destination for Veterans to manage, apply for, manage, and track the benefits they earned, replacing hundreds of disparate and difficult-to-navigate websites across the agency; Caseflow, a core part of the Department’s appeals modernization effort that provides a modern, intuitive, and largely automated interface for processing Veterans’ appeals for VA judges and attorneys; and the Clinician User Interface, a Web-based wizard that streamlines and shortens the disability compensation claim process. Marina’s team was also the first to bring commercial cloud computing and modern development practices, including continuous integration and deployment, to the VA.

She was formerly Senior Advisor to U.S. CTO Todd Park, with a portfolio focusing on the VA. As part of the inaugural class of Presidential Innovation Fellows, Marina served as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the US Department of Education, where she worked with internal and private sector innovators to use open educational data and standards as fuel for apps and services that can help achieve national priorities such as increasing college affordability and completion rates.

Prior to joining the federal government, Marina was Founder & CEO of the business efficiency consulting firm The Type-A Way and author of the book Business Efficiency for Dummies. She has also been recognized as a Technology and Democracy Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and is a proud alum of The Taft School.

Marina lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband Charles and dog, Fiona.