The Speakers

Christopher Whitaker is a civic technologist with a hybrid background in public administration and product management having served in both delivery and operations roles at the Defense Digital Service, United States Digital Service, Code for America and is the co-founder and executive director of the Alliance of Civic Technologists. Christopher is a veteran of the US Army having as served as mechanized infantry in Iraq. He holds a Master's in Public Administration from DePaul University and lives in the Chicago area.

Jingyan Wang received her PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and her B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech, affiliated with the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Algorithm and Randomness Center.  She uses tools from statistics and machine learning to understand and improve evaluation systems, such as those involving hiring, admissions, and peer review. Her interdisciplinary research has been published in statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, human computation, and economics and computation. She was the recipient of the Best Student Paper Award at AAMAS 2019, and was selected as a Rising Star in EECS and in Data Science.

For the last three years, Katie Tobin served as President Biden’s top migration advisor in the National Security Council. Appointed as Deputy Assistant to the President and NSC Coordinator for the Los Angeles Declaration, Tobin led U.S. policy development on a wide-range of cross-border national security matters. During her tenure in the White House, she spearheaded the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, President Biden’s signature migration framework that was adopted by 21 countries in the Western Hemisphere in June 2022. She was also a lead architect of Operation Allies Welcome (2021), the Uniting for Ukraine humanitarian parole program (April 2022), the Venezuela Enforcement Initiative (October 2022), and the Safe Mobility Offices Initiative (June 2023). In the aviation sphere, she drove the launch of the Domestic Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS) National Action Plan in April 2022, the first whole-of-government strategy to protect against the nefarious use of commercial drones.  Prior to joining the Biden Administration, Tobin served for nearly a decade with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), advising the United States and governments across Latin America and the Caribbean on refugee and migration response. She has also served as a Refugee Officer at the Department of Homeland Security and an attorney in private practice in Chicago. During law school, she clerked for Senator Edward Kennedy and Senator Richard Durbin on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Katie started her career working at Annunciation House, an organization that runs migrant shelters on the U.S.-Mexico border.  In March 2024, Tobin returned home to Chicago to be closer to family. She currently serves as a nonresident scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a senior advisor for WestExec Advisory LLC. She is also an active press contributor in print and TV media, including the Wall Street Journal and MSNBC.  Tobin earned her and her B.A. from Villanova University and J.D. from The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law.

Tobi is an experienced technology and policy professional who is passionate about building a safe and inclusive digital future. As a Senior Analyst at the UN Office of the Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology, she advances digital cooperation initiatives, focusing on Digital Public Infrastructure, Digital Commons, and capacity building. She currently stewards the DPI Safeguards working groups to develop a framework to address risks such as exclusion, discrimination, and privacy concerns in DPI implementations. Previously, Tobi worked in the energy sector as a Digital Transformation Analyst, driving innovative solutions for predictive maintenance, data analytics, and safety systems. She holds a Bachelor's in Computer Science from the University of Lagos, a Master's in Computing Information Engineering from Robert Gordon University (where she graduated top of her class), and a Master's in International Affairs from Columbia University. Outside of work, Tobi is an aviation enthusiast committed to earning her private pilot's license soon.