Terry Halvorsen took on the responsibilities as chief information officer for the Department of Defense in March 2015.

The Pentagon CIO serves as principal adviser to the defense secretary on various aspects of information technology, data management, satellite communications, timing programs, navigation, telecommunications and other non-intelligence space platforms.

Halvorsen is also responsible for the delivery of IT platforms and services necessary to support a wide range of missions across the agency.

He is a former Department of the Navy’s CIO and deputy commander of the Navy Cyber Forces.

Halvorsen worked for four years as deputy commander of the Naval Network Warfare Command and helped manage the service branch’s knowledge management, space, information and network operations.

The Excellence in Government Leadership Fellow was involved in Operation Desert Storm and other assignments for the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer.

Halvorsen graduated from Widener University with a bachelor’s degree in history and from the University of West Florida with a master’s degree in educational technology.

David Bray has served as the chief information officer of the Federal Communications Commission since 2013 and is in charge of the agency’s information technology transformation efforts.

His team won the Association for Federal Information Resources Management’s 2015 cloud computing leadership award for the rollout of a new cloud-based IT at FCC.

Bray also received this year’s Outstanding Achievement Award for Civilian Government from the Armed Forces Communications and Electronic Association.

He has worked as a project manager at a Microsoft partner firm and Yahoo, IT chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention‘s bioterrorism preparedness and response program and executive director of the National Commission for the Review of the Research and Development Programs of the United States Intelligence Community.

Bray is a Senior National Intelligence Service Executive, an Eisenhower Fellow to Taiwan and Australia and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Camron Gorguinpour is the director of transformational innovation within the office of the assistant secretary of the U.S. Air Force for acquisitions, with responsibility in executing reform programs.

Gorguinpour also serves as executive director for the Defense Department Plug-In Electric Vehicle Program, where he works to help integrate PEV’s efforts into DoD’s non-tactical vehicle fleet.

He previously served as executive director for Scientists & Engineers for America before joining the DoD.

As a six-year co-founder and executive director, Gorguinpour also helped the Space Science Outreach and Research develop two public charter schools in collaboration with NASA, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Cesar E. Chavez Foundation.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics and physics from UC Berkeley and a doctor’s degree in bioengineering from the UC Berkeley/UC San Francisco Joint Graduate Program.

Philip Bourne serves as the associate director of data science at the National Institutes of Health and specializes in research and other activities that drive the accessibility of scientific data to aid the national biomedical community.

His work covers areas such as machine learning, text mining, metalanguages and visualization in support of systems pharmacology, immunology, scientific dissemination and similar programs.

Before joining NIH in 2014, Bourne worked at the University of California in San Diego as associate vice chancellor for innovation and industry alliances and a professor in the pharmacology department and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

He also served as associate director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank and adjunct professor at the Sanford Burnham Institute and co-founded ViSoft, Protein Vision, SciVee and the PLOS Computational Biology journal.

Bourne is an elected fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Medical Informatics Association and International Society for Computational Biology.

Heidi Shyu serves as assistant Army secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology.

She oversees the Army’s logistics operations, acquisition system and lifecycle management of weapons platforms and equipment.

Shyu also leads the Army Acquisition Workforce and the Army Acquisition Corps and manages the department’s chemical weapons elimination program.

Before joining the agency, she previously worked at Raytheon’s space and airborne systems business as vice president of technology strategy.

She also helped develop Tile Active Electronically Scanned Antenna platforms during her tenure as director of Joint Strike Fighter antenna technologies at Raytheon.

She has also held a range of executive positions at defense contractors and aerospace firms including Hughes Aircraft, Grumman and Litton Industries and spent a decade as a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.

Shyu graduated from the University of New Brunswick with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics.

She also has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of California Los Angeles and a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Toronto.

Jerry McGinn is the principal deputy director for the U.S. Defense Department‘s office of manufacturing and industrial base policy and holds responsibility over the development of studies, guidelines and policies concerning the defense industrial supply chain.

He rejoined DoD in July 2015 after leading Virginia-based McGinn Defense Consulting as president.

Between July 2012 and October 2014, he served as a specialist leader at Deloitte, where he led business development activities in the security cooperation sector and thought leadership programs with multiple trade groups.

McGinn also worked at QinetiQ North America from November 2011 to March 2012 as vice president of strategic initiatives.

Before that, he was corporate director of international government relations at Northrop Grumman and oversaw export policy advocacy initiatives to help grow the company’s work through the U.S. foreign military sales program.

He also served as special assistant to the DoD principal deputy undersecretary and as a political scientist at public policy research firm Rand Corp.

McGinn is also a former U.S. Army infantry officer and chaired TechAmerica Foundation’s international defense task force and the Project for the Common Defense group’s defense reform committee.

He also became a part of the Aerospace Industries Association, British American Business Association, National Defense Industries Association, NATO Industrial Advisory Group and Defense Science Board.

He authored publications about security cooperation, acquisition reform, direct commercial and foreign military sales, technology transfer, defense contracting, industrial base policy and national security.

McGinn holds a bachelor’s degree in modern European history from the U.S. Military Academy, as well as master’s degrees in foreign service and history and a Ph.D. degree in history from Georgetown University.

Anita Bales has served as director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency since the end of August 2014 and is in charge of the agency’s global operations and resources.

She provides executive direction to DCAA’s professional auditors and other personnel as well as oversees program planning, development, implementation and evaluation in support of its contract audit mission.

Bales has been on the Senior Executive Service since 2006 and has held other audit leadership roles with the U.S. Army in both domestic and international assignments.

Prior to her current role, she was deputy director of DCAA, deputy auditor general of the Army Audit Agency‘s forces and financial audits division and program director of the financial management audits division.

She is a member of the American Society of Military Comptrollers, Association of Government Accountants and Association of the U.S. Army.

Bales is also a certified public accountant, information systems auditor and government financial manager as well as a recipient of awards such as the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency Award for Auditing.

John Pescatore is the emerging security trends director at the SANS Institute, a cooperative research and development organization.

He brings more than 35 years of experience to his position and began his career with the National Security Agency as a designer of secure voice systems.

Pescatore developed secure computing and telecommunications systems for GTE after his tenure at the NSA.

He later moved to Entrust Technologies and Trusted Information Systems, where he managed security consulting groups with core focus on firewalls, network security, encryption and public key infrastructures.

Later in his career, Pescatore served as lead security analyst at Gartner prior to taking his current role at SANS.

Pescatore earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Connecticut.

Stuart Delery serves as the U.S. acting associate attorney general, with responsibility in helping the attorney general and the deputy attorney general to implement departmental policies and programs.

Delery leads the Justice Department‘s civil litigating and grant-making components, Office of Tribal Justice, Executive Office for U.S. Trustees, Office of Information Policy, Foreign Claims Settlement Commission and the Access to Justice Initiative.

He is also the government’s chief FOIA officer, vice chairman of the steering committee of the president’s financial fraud enforcement task force and previously served as co-chairman of various working groups within that task force.

The Senate confirmed Delery as assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil division on Aug. 1, 2013, with responsibility in national security, health and safety and financial fraud cases.

He joined the department as chief of staff and counselor to the deputy attorney general in January 2009 and became the associate deputy attorney general later.

Delery was previously a partner in WilmerHale’s Washington D.C. office, where he served on the litigation department and the appellate and supreme court litigation practice group, and as vice chair of the law firm’s securities department.

He is a graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Virginia.

Ahmed Haque serves as the director of the Office of Programs and Engagement in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology‘s.

He leads efforts to drive adoption of interoperable health IT in the U.S.

His work at the Department of Health and Human Services agency also covers the reform of the health service delivery system, including technical assistance development, learning and education programs and resource dissemination.

He previously served with the National Quality Forum as program designer and subject matter expert on health informatics standards.

Haque has also worked on health services research on healthcare policy with the American Hospital Association and founded the IT startup company Reviving Styles.