Denice W. Ross is a nonresident fellow in the Research to Action Lab at the Urban Institute, where she focuses on building a more resilient national data infrastructure. She is also a senior fellow with the Federation of American Scientists, a senior fellow with the National Conference on Citizenship, and an executive fellow in applied technology policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Ross is a seasoned organizer of diverse data colleagues across civil society, academia, tech companies, and government. Most recently, she was deputy US chief technology officer and US chief data scientist, where she led the charge across federal agencies to use disaggregated data to drive better outcomes for all Americans. 

Ross’s 25-year career using data to serve the public interest has spanned federal and local government, academia, and the nonprofit sector across domains ranging from climate to policing. She was a Presidential Innovation Fellow for the US Department of Energy and director of enterprise information for the City of New Orleans. Before government, Ross codirected the nonprofit data intermediary The Data Center, where she collaborated with the Brookings Institution to track New Orleans’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina. She brought a data-driven approach to numerous post-Katrina community planning initiatives and cofounded the first new child care center after the storm. 

Ross holds an undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Arizona, where she was a Goldwater scholar, and a master’s degree in energy and climate policy from Johns Hopkins University.