Ashkan Soltani, former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, has joined the White House’s office of science and technology policy as a senior adviser to Federal Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith, FCW’s Insider blog reported Wednesday.
Bianca Spinosa writes Lorrie Faith Cranor, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, will serve as Soltani’s successor at FTC in January.
Soltani will advise Smith on issues related to privacy, big data and consumer protection and help create career opportunities for technology professionals through collaboration with federal agencies.
Before he joined FTC, he worked at The Washington Post as an investigative journalist and became a 2014 Pulitzer Prize recipient for his reports on the surveillance initiatives of the National Security Agency, Spinosa reports.
Soltani previously served as a staff technologist at FTC in 2010 and a technical consultant at The Wall Street Journal, the report said.
