Infrastructure: Blueprints of Tomorrow

Dr. Benjamin L. Brown is the Director of the Facilities Division in the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR). The Division conceives, constructs, and operates world-leading open-access supercomputing, data, and networking facilities to enable the DOE mission and the national research enterprise. The Division’s $575M (FY 2021) budget is devoted to operations and major upgrade projects at each of the ASCR Facilities. As Director, Ben leads strategic planning, budget formulation, and operational oversight of these strategic national resources. He is a member of the federal Senior Executive Service.

Ben is also the program manager for the Department’s Project Leadership Institute, a leadership development program in project management. Ben has extensive knowledge and expertise in policy development and analysis related to large scale scientific research infrastructure and project management. A common focus in each of these roles is the strategic advancement of science and the DOE mission through cross-institutional knowledge-sharing, strategic planning, and partnership development.

Immediately prior to joining the Office of Science in 2008, Ben worked on energy and climate policy in the U.S. Senate as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Congressional Fellow. Ben is a physicist with experience working in U.S. government laboratories and academic institutions in both the U.S. and U.K; his research focused on optical control of quantum systems and quantum information science. He received his Ph.D. in optics from the University of Rochester and his bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard University.

Robert (Bob) Costello is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). As the CIO, he leads the Agency’s efforts to develop, deploy, secure, and support technology solutions for the agency.

Prior to this, he was a Public Sector Civilian Strategic Advisor at World Wide Technology. In this role, he engaged with federal government customers to identify and solve their most complex challenges, leveraging his extensive federal agency experience to develop and deliver innovative solutions that meet their needs and serve their mission.

Bob brings a wealth of experience serving over 13 years at DHS, both at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. He also served as the Senior Executive Service as the Executive Director (XD) of the Office of Information and Technology (OIT) Enterprise Networks and Technology Support Directorate (ENTSD) at CBP, as well as serving concurrently in the role of Acting XD of the Border Enforcement and Management Systems Directorate. During his tenure in ENTSD, he oversaw the modernization of the largest data network in DHS, improved connectivity to cloud service providers, and dramatically increased the agency’s usage of mobility platforms. He also oversaw the agency’s movement to the TIC 3.0 framework and implemented zero trust solutions at the network level. He led the operations of the agency’s land mobile radio network, the National Law Enforcement Communications Center, and maintenance of the non-intrusive inspection systems utilized at all ports of entry. He also directed all software development for the U.S. Border Patrol, and all of the agency’s mission support systems, moving over 100 applications to a SECDEVOPS development methodology. He was also heavily involved in implementing IT solutions for COVID-19, redesigning remote access solutions and deploying several new applications.

G. Nagesh Rao currently serves as Chief Information Officer for the Bureau of Industry and Security within the US Department of Commerce. Most recently he was Director of Business Technology Solutions (BiTS) at the US Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Office of the Chief Information Officer, and prior to was Chief Technologist & Entrepreneur in Residence within SBA’s Office of Investment & Innovation.

Over the last 20+ years, Nagesh has worked for numerous organizations in the public, private, and not for profit sectors. During his time in the public-sector, he has co-developed federal-wide policy initiatives around spurring small business and technological innovation as well programmatic endeavors such as i6 Green, Patents for Humanity, USAID’s-SBAR Program, and SBA’s Growth Accelerator Fund Competition. Furthermore he oversaw the revamp and modernization of SBA’s digital platforms including SBIR.gov and SBA.gov, as well led technology direction, as part of SBA’s COVID-19 leadership response team, with respect to the agency’s Virtual Command Center, PPP and EIDL endeavors via the CARES Act. In his initial year of service at BIS-Commerce, under Nagesh’s leadership, the Bureau has overcome 15+ years of technical debt and digitally transformed the way business is conducted via COTS, Cloud, and SaaS based solutions adopting a modern day technology stack standard.

Nagesh’s musings (written and oratorical) have been featured and/or quoted via Wired, TechCrunch, WAMC-NPR, The Scientist, The National Academies, The Hill, FedTech Magazine, DC Inno, Technical.ly DC, NextGov, Daily Mirror (Sri Lankan version), Financial Times (Sri Lankan version), and The Courier-Journal.

Nagesh is a 2004 Mirzayan Fellow of The National Academies and a 2016 USA Eisenhower Fellow. Among many accolades that Nagesh has received over the years, prominent ones include the Mahatma Gandhi Pravasi Samman & Hind Rattan awards from the NRI Welfare Society, Fed 100, ACT-IAC Collaboration Award, BT 150, DC Inno 50 on Fire, 2019 Gears of Government, and the RPI Alumni Key Award.

Kurt Steege is the Chief Technology Officer at Thundercat Technology, is a Service-Disabled, Veteran-Owned Small Business that delivers technology services and solutions to the federal government and Fortune 500 companies. At Thundercat he is responsible for driving technology value for our clients through evaluation, architecture and outreach.

Prior to joining Thundercat, Kurt was the Chief Information Officer of MacAndrews and Forbes Inc., a diverse global holding company, based in New York City. During his time there he led a complete IT transformation and brought the company a modern standardized infrastructure upon which the business can depend. In the government space, Kurt served as the Chief Enterprise Architect at the FBI. Under Kurt’s leadership at the FBI the EAPO created roadmaps for IT Transformation, strategic direction for Shared Services, Mobility, Storage, and User Experience.

Over the rest of his 20+ year career in Information Technology, Kurt has held roles within private industries for technology, financials, and education to help drive value and efficiency into small, medium and large organizations.

Sean Thompson has been at Red Hat for 11 years, where he now leads the solution architect team for Red Hat’s Financial agency marketing. Mr. Thompson and his team are responsible for helping customers transform by adopting enterprise open source technologies.

He was formerly the lead solution architect supporting customers by helping them adopt cloud services, move workloads to the cloud, and guide them to automating at scale. Prior to that he supported Red Hat’s Federal OEM partners in Cisco, Dell, IBM, and HP. There he helped them understand and adopt Red Hat technologies into their architectures.

Prior Sean worked in the Red Hat Consulting’s Global Solution & Strategy Office where he worked on standardizing consulting delivery, creating services products, assisting customers in Unix to Linux migrations. He was also responsible for the Global Enablement of new products.

During Mr. Thompson’s prior experience at IBM he was a software developer and helped customers adopt middleware for 10 years. Lastly, Sean started his career at Microsoft where he did software testing for Microsoft Powerpoint.