Marina Martin

Marina Martin Marina Martin 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. Marina is currently working with multiple states to help identify and implement best 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 Public Interest Technology vertical at the New America Foundation, where she is currently a Fellow. She is also proud to be on the advisory board for Foster America and has been an active volunteer Court-Appointed Special Advocate for at-risk foster youth for over a decade. Marina is extremely interested in hearing from anyone working in this space or adjacent spaces. She is also a partner in the incident response team Layer Aleph, which restores complex software systems to service. If your business is suffering an outage or inability to make changes safely, we can help. Marina Martin served as 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 18 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 fiancé Charles and their dog, Mo. Contact Marina at me-(at)-marinamartin.com