WW-P students may head to the White House for class trips or as part of activities associated with organizations to which they belong. But one WW-P graduate will be heading his own department under President Barack Obama.##M:[more]##
Aneesh Chopra, 36, who graduated from the West Windsor-Plainsboro school system in 1990, was selected by the President as the nation’s first chief technology officer. His appointment is pending Senate approval.
Chopra has been serving as Virginia’s secretary of technology, and according to the White House website, he leads the state’s “strategy to effectively leverage technology in government reform, to promote Virginia’s innovation agenda, and to foster technology-related economic development.”
Chopra was born in 1972 in New Jersey and grew up in Plainsboro. He graduated from the South campus in 1990 and went on to earn a degree in public health, health policy, and management from Johns Hopkins University in 1994. From there, Chopra attended Harvard, earning his master’s in public policy in 1997. He is married to Rohini Dhir Chopra.
From April, 1997, through January, 2006, Chopra was a managing partner at the Advisory Board Company, a for-profit company that provides general best practices for research, executive education, product consulting, and business intelligence solutions to a membership of more than 2,”6000 hospitals, health systems, and universities in the United States and worldwide.
He was appointed in January, 2006, to his current post as the secretary of technology for Virginia, the first state in the country to have such a position. In his Facebook.com profile, Chopra wrote that “Virginia is also one of the most progressive states in the country in terms of understanding what the proper role is for my job.”
Chopra says he focuses on three areas. “I promote Virginia’s technology economy,” he said. “We elevate the quality of IT services inside the government, buying technology for government workers. Third, I am responsible for promoting, or as I like to call it, instilling public sector excellence. This means that we find a way to leverage technology in all other areas of government. For example, we see how we can use technology to advance health care, education, transportation, energy policy, and so forth — looking for places where technology can make improvements.”
In his new role as the country’s chief technology officer, Chopra will be responsible for promoting technological innovation to help what Obama describes as the country’s most urgent priorities — “from creating jobs and reducing health care costs to keeping our nation secure,” Obama wrote.
