Denice Ross is a Senior Fellow at the National Conference on Citizenship, as well as a Fellow-in-Residence at Georgetown’s Beeck Center, where she supports the Schmidt Futures data collaboratives portfolio, around issues such as disasters, opioids/addiction, Census 2020, climate change, policing, and workforce. At New America, she studied climate security and the power of networks to advance progress on big challenges. As a Presidential Innovation Fellow in the Obama administration, she co-founded the White House Police Data Initiative to increase transparency and accountability in the wake of Ferguson, and worked with the Department of Energy on crowdsourcing private-sector data to improve community resilience in disaster-impacted areas.
Before moving to the DC area, she served as Director of Enterprise Information for the City of New Orleans, where she established their open data initiative, now recognized as one of the most successful in the country. Prior to government, Denice co-directed the Data Center, a non-profit data intermediary. After Hurricane Katrina, she collaborated with Brookings to track the city’s recovery through the definitive New Orleans Index. She brought a data-driven approach to numerous post-Katrina community planning initiatives, and co-founded the first new childcare center after the storm. Denice holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Arizona, where she was a Goldwater Scholar.