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Olivia Zhu
"I was motivated to use my tech skills to address societal needs."
At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, I was working at Amazon as part of a team that sourced PPE (masks, gloves, hand sanitizer) to provide to healthcare and other essential workers.
While this effort was a pivot from my day-to-day work, I was extremely motivated by the mission to use my tech skills to make a meaningful impact in a time of great societal need. This project inspired me to find similar opportunities in the government to apply my technology skills for public service.
Today, I am a Presidential Innovation Fellow (PIF) working at the White House Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer within the Office of Management and Budget. The government has a wide range of technology challenges, from cybersecurity to data sharing to AI, and our office provides technical guidance across all of them to a broad set of government agencies. Not only is this a technically complex problem, but I also find it incredibly rewarding to work on tech policy which can make our government more secure or improve customer experience for the American public when interacting with the government. I'm fortunate to be working on these problems with inspiring, talented, and public service-oriented teammates, both at the White House and in the PIF cohort.
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