Modernizing IT Systems for AI Adoption

Josh Finke is the senior vice president of public sector at Lumen as is responsible for driving the business’ overall go-to-market strategy and profit and loss. Finke has more than 25 years of technology leadership experience in artificial intelligence, cloud, communications, networking and security. Finke was previously chief solutions officer at Compucom, chief strategy officer at Zones and vice president of advanced and emerging technologies at Iron Bow Technologies.

A catalyst for industry-defining innovation, Pritha Mehra oversees one of the world’s largest technology infrastructures. With breadth and depth of expertise across a range of verticals from marketing to technology, she has been tapped to steward critical change in every role of her career. Today she serves as the Chief Information Officer of USPS, re-envisioning and transforming the enterprise for greater performance and innovation at scale.

Pritha is a thought leader on digital transformations and is focused on modernizing mission-critical ecosystems, platforms and networks to meet the demands of an increasingly competitive market environment. She led the launch of the USPS API Platform, which connects customers to the latest shipping solutions as USPS optimizes its unmatched delivery network; ushered the deployment of a high-end logistics ecosystem; and directed the creation of the digital infrastructure to receive and fulfill orders for 885 million COVID tests to 90 million households. In just 3 weeks, her team set up the 2-click website and backend systems that accepted 44 million orders on the first day.

Pritha has received numerous recognitions including the Women in Logistics and Delivery Services Award for Excellence, and FedScoop’s Top Boss in IT. Under her leadership, the USPS CIO received the 2023 Current Data Streaming Award for Innovation and 2022 Service to the Citizen Award for its COVID-19 distribution system. A thought leader on digital transformation Pritha serves on the Geoge Mason College of Engineering and Computing Advisory Board and is a featured speaker at many notable venues on modernization, AI and innovation.

Nick Weber is the Acting Director of the Office of Scientific Computing Services at the NIH Center for Information Technology (CIT). He has been supporting cloud computing, high-performance computing, and other scientific infrastructure activities to enable research within the NIH for 14 years. The past few years have been focused on the NIH Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) Initiative. He has a passion for applying technology and innovation to scientific research.

He serves as the Program Manager for STRIDES, providing leadership and direction to the core teams within STRIDES who implement the day-to-day activities for the program. He also represents STRIDES internally and externally, where he coordinates with NIH leadership and cloud service providers to bring optimal value to the NIH research community.

Prior to leading the STRIDES Initiative, Weber was the Lead for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Translational Bioinformatics Program. He also served as a contractor for NIAID’s Bioinformatics and Computational Biosciences Branch of the Office of Cyber Infrastructure and Computational Biology.

Weber holds a B.S. in Comprehensive Sciences from Villanova University, an M.S. in Information Management from Syracuse University and an M.B.A. from Johns Hopkins University.