Since our founding in 2015, we’ve strived to place technologists in Capitol Hill to positively impact the future of tech policy. In the past year, our program has experienced tremendous growth. We’ve tripled our Congressional Innovation Scholars Program to bring more early-career technologists to Congress and created the Congressional Digital Service Fellowship. We’ve worked with the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress to improve Congress’ digital infrastructure, began a jobs newsletter to connect technologists with policy opportunities, and launched our impact page to highlight the accomplishments of our alumni post-fellowship. We are committed to including technologists in every step of the policymaking process and bringing more people into public interest technology to make an impact.
To capitalize on this growth, we decided to recruit and bring on our first hybrid class of Congressional Innovation Fellows and Congressional Innovation Scholars. We’re so excited to welcome our 2022 Fellows!
Joel Burke, Congressional Innovation Fellow: Joel is the former Head of Business Development at the Republic of Estonia’s e-Residency program and served in the program’s leadership team, where he was in charge of business strategy and managing relationships with key stakeholders like UNCTAD. Previously, he was an entrepreneur and early-stage startup employee as the ninth employee at Gigster, an Andreessen Horowitz backed company in Silicon Valley before helping launch a venture in Berlin for Rocket Internet, a publicly traded company builder.
Jack Cable, Congressional Innovation Scholar: Jack is a hacker who works at the intersection of cybersecurity and public policy. He most recently was a security architect for the Krebs Stamos Group. He is passionate about public service, having worked on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's election security team and at the Defense Digital Service. Jack holds a B.S. in computer science from Stanford University.
Ro Encarnacion, Congressional Innovation Scholar: Ro is a technologist interested in policy questions at the intersection of algorithmic fairness, markets, and society. Previously, Ro was an engineer at Stanford University working on a social impact tool for equity in representation across media and journalism. She is a proud alumna of Lehman College with a B.A. in Computer Science.
Maia Hamin, Congressional Innovation Scholar: At Palantir, Maia built products and programs to bring today’s data technology to governments and corporations in a privacy- and rights-preserving manner. At Princeton, she published on scalable data collection for policy research and explanatory models of cognitive processes. She wants to work on how we inform and design policy that incentivizes the development of beneficial, values-aligned computing technology.
Jennifer Hernandez, Congressional Innovation Fellow: Jennifer is an innovator that views challenges as opportunities and believes in the power of technology to improve everyday life. As the City of Miami’s first Senior Data Scientist, she enabled fact-based decision-making, applied machine learning models to improve government services and prototyped data solutions that leverage cutting-edge technologies such as blockchains and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Lauren Lombardo, Senior Congressional Innovation Scholar: Lauren is a digital government and technology policy expert. She was previously a Senior Data Scientist at Nielsen and has worked in California politics. Lauren most recently served as a technology and policy consultant for several local, state, and federal government organizations. Lauren holds a Master in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Eric Lukoff, Congressional Innovation Fellow: Eric has been working at the intersection of social justice and technology for more than 13 years, most recently as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer of One Degree, an anti-poverty nonprofit organization that he co-founded. He has also been a key contributor to major consumer web platforms at scale, including Change.org and Vote.org.
Seeyew Mo, Congressional Innovation Fellow: Seeyew is a community organizer and technology expert. He was a Tech Lead at Salesforce, where he led engineers who created mobile features used by millions. Seeyew co-founded an advocacy group to organize and empower families, deployed AI tools to increase Asian American voter turnout, and built an online platform to train grassroots organizers. He holds an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School, an MS in Engineering Management from Santa Clara University, and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin.
Christian Perez, Senior Congressional Innovation Scholar: Christian is a technologist with expertise in environmental health policy. Christian utilizes artificial intelligence to research emerging environmental health issues at the Center of Research Excellence in Science and Technology at Florida International University (F.I.U.). He is a current Ph.D. Candidate in Public Health at FIU who holds an M.P.H. from F.I.U. and B.S. from Florida State University.
Ben Swartz, Congressional Innovation Fellow: Ben is a software engineer who has worked at the intersection of technology, politics, and entertainment. Most recently, he worked at the non-profit Empower, building relational organizing software for Democratic groups in the 2020 election. Prior to that, Ben was an early engineer at Twitch, where he led teams to build products used by over a hundred million users.