Mindy Connolly joined the General Services Administration in February 2011 after serving as the senior policy analyst at the Office of Federal Procurement Policy where she led the agency’s natural resources division. In her role there, she was instrumental in President Barack Obama’s 2009 federal executive order aiming to cut back on agency greenhouse gas emissions.

The October 2009 order set a goal of 2020 for federal agencies to  reduce emissions and reduce petroleum consumption.

Before joining the federal government, Connolly worked as a contractor, herself, in the defense sector of  Honeywell International.

At GSA, Connolly has said she will focus on promoting government-contractor communication. “[T]here are barriers to communication on both sides of the desk … Both sides still have a lot to learn about how we need to communicate; it’s a two-way street,” she said.

William J. Lynn III was named the 30^th deputy secretary of defense by President Barack Obama in 2009.

He worked in a number of positions in the Defense Department, including director of program analysis and evaluation, as well as DoD comptroller, a position he served in from 1997 to 2001.

Lynn’s longtime public service is balanced by stints in the private sector. He served as senior vice president of government operations and strategy at Raytheon, and as executive vice president of DFI International, a Washington-based management consulting firm.

Lynn graduated from Dartmouth College and Cornell Law School and he has a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University.

James W. Cluck is the deputy for acquisitions for the U.S. Special Operations Command based at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.

In his role at USSOCOM and as a member of the Senior Executive Service, he is responsible for all special operations forces research, development, acquisition, procurement and logistics.

Cluck has been a member of the USSOCOM since 1992. Previously, he was an aviation photographic-electronics technician with the Marine Corps, before entering The Citadel and being commissioned as an air defense officer, working as a systems engineering officer and project manager for developing signals intelligence systems. Cluck retired from the USMC in 1989.

While at USSOCOM, he held a number of positions, including program manager for both intelligence systems and C4I automation systems, as well as CIO and director of the Center for Networks and Communications.

He holds a bachelor’s degree from The Citadel and a master’s degree from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

Four-star Gen. Stanley McChrystal retired from his storied military career in June 2010.

Before his resignation as commander of all U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, McChrystal, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, was the director of the Joint Staff and the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command.

While heading the JSOC, McChrystal oversaw the capture of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and is credited with the elimination of al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

In September 2010, McChrystal began teaching a course on leadership at Yale University. Titled “Leadership in Operation,” the class will be offered to graduate students at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and will cover a diverse range of topics such as the media environment and navigating politics.

McChrystal will also draw on his personal combat experiences in teaching the course.

Before taking over as executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Border Initiative, Mark Borkowski had been serving as a program manager for the U.S. Border Patrol.

All told he has a combined 25 years of experience in systems acquisitions as well as program management in agencies and departments such as NASA and the Air Force. Known as a fixer in the industry, took over as head of the SBI in Sept. 2008.

Eugene Huang serves as the Director of Government Operations for National Broadband Task Force at the the Federal Communication Commission. He formerly served in the Treasury Department during the Bush administration, and moved to the FCC in 2009.

Huang served in the Treasury Department under two Secretaries as a policy advisor and White House fellow. He worked on issues related to international finance and economic issues and bi-lateral relations between the U.S. and China. During that time he managed the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue (SED) and  the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED).

He was a visiting scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) at Stanford University. He also served in the Commonwealth of Virginia as Deputy Secretary of Technology and later Secretary of Technology during Governor Mark R. Warner’s administration.

Huang graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School, a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a M.S. in Telecommunications Engineering. He also received a M.Phil., with distinction, in Economic History from St. Peter’s College, Oxford University.

He is also a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

You can view his remarks on “Broadband and the Future of Civic Engagement” here

As director of National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Letitia A. Long is the first woman to lead a major intelligence agency. She has more than 30 years of engineering and intelligence experience, previously serving as deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, deputy director of naval intelligence and as coordinator of intelligence community activities for the director of central intelligence.

Beth Simone Noveck is the United States deputy chief technology officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative. Currently on leave from her academic career, she previously taught at the New York Law School in the areas of intellectual property, innovation and constitutional law, as well as courses on electronic democracy and electronic government.

Noveck created the Democracy Design Workshop, a collaborative “do tank,” where students and faculty at New York Law School work in teams to develop legal code and software code to promote transparent and collaborative ways of learning, working and governing.

With the support of grants from various foundations and corporations, Noveck launched the Peer to Patent: Community Patent Review project in collaboration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Peer-to-Patent is the legal, policy and software framework to open patent examination for public participation for the first time.

Noveck is also the founder and organizer of the State of Play conferences, the annual event on virtual worlds research. With the support of the Maya Foundation, she launched the State of Play Academy, a virtual world space for democratizing legal education by teaching law to non-lawyers. The academy is also an experimental space for studying the impact of virtual worlds on learning and teaching.

Noveck is a member of the ABA’s Commission on Electronic Rulemaking and the OMB Watch Taskforce on Transparency and Public Participation in Government. She is a member of the Legal Expert Network of the Institute for the Study of the Information Society and Technology at the Carnegie Mellon Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, a member of the editorial board for First Monday, I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, and of the advisory board of the International Journal for Communications Law and Policy. She is a member of the advisory board of the Nanyang Technical University Centre on Asia Pacific Technology Law and Policy in Singapore, where she visited as a Fulbright senior specialist.

Previously a telecommunications and Internet lawyer practicing in New York, Noveck is also the McClatchy associate visiting professor at the Department of Communication at Stanford University. She served as a volunteer adviser on innovation in government for Obama for America and as a member of the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform Policy group for the Obama-Biden transition.

Noveck graduated from Harvard University with bachelor’s degree in social studies and a master’s degree in comparative literature. She earned a law degree from Yale Law School. After studying as a Rotary Foundation graduate fellow at Oxford University, she earned a doctorate at the University of Innsbruck with the support of a Fulbright grant.

Janet Napolitano is the third secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. She leads the nation’s collective efforts to secure it from various threats, including terrorism and natural disasters.

To counter the threat of terrorism, Napolitano has forged new partnerships with international allies and expanded information sharing with federal, state and local law enforcement. She has initiated a course to strengthen security along the southwest border, deploying additional personnel and advanced technology, while working with Mexico to combat violent international drug cartels.

Napolitano also has implemented an effective approach to enforcing immigration laws and prioritizing public safety while targeting criminal aliens and pursuing employers that take advantage of illegal labor. She has strengthened the nation’s ability to prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters by cutting through red tape and expediting decision-making along the Gulf Coast, providing new resources to build resilient communities and bolster their response capabilities, and urging Americans to take part of the shared responsibility of making the nation secure.

Prior to becoming secretary, Napolitano was in her second term as governor of Arizona and was recognized as a national leader on homeland security, border security and immigration. She was the first woman to chair the National Governors Association and was named one of the top five governors in the country by Time magazine. Napolitano was also the first female attorney general of Arizona and served as U.S. attorney for the District of Arizona.

Napolitano graduated from Santa Clara University, where she won a Truman Scholarship and was the university’s first female valedictorian, and received her law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law. Before entering public office, Napolitano served as a clerk for Judge Mary M. Schroeder on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and practiced law in Phoenix at the firm of Lewis and Roca.

Robert A. Harding is a major general who retired from the Army in 2001 after serving for 33 years. He was recently tapped by President Barack Obama to head the TSA. He subsequently withdrew his nomination.

Previously, Harding was CEO and president of Harding Security Associates, a security consultant firm specializing in homeland security assignments. He previously served as executive vice president of operations at Innovative Logistics Techniques, where he had corporate responsibility for managing and expanding operational aspects of INNLOG’s business.

In his last military assignment in 2001, Harding was the U.S. Army Deputy G2 (intelligence). His responsibilities included planning and executing the Army’s intelligence programs. Prior to that role, he was director for operations at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Some of his positions there include DoD’s senior human intelligence officer and functional manager for intelligence collection management for DoD.

Harding’s military awards and decorations include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Army Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Superior Medal, the Legion of Merit with three oak leaf clusters, the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, and the Meritorious Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters.

Harding has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Bowie State University, a master’s degree in business from Salve Regina University, and a master’s degree in national security and strategy from the U.S. Naval War College.