Denice Ross

Senior Fellow, National Conference on Citizenship Fellow
Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation, Georgetown University​

Denice works to turn data into action for the public good. Her main focus currently is on tech and data issues related to the 2020 Census, and she also provides strategic support for the new State Chief Data Officer Network. Denice comes to this work from New America, where she studied climate security and the power of networks to advance progress on big challenges.
As a Presidential Innovation Fellow in the Obama administration, she co-founded the White House Police Data Initiative to increase transparency and accountability in the wake of Ferguson and worked with the Department of Energy on crowdsourcing private-sector data to improve community resilience in disaster-impacted areas.
Earlier, she served as Director of Enterprise Information for the City of New Orleans, where she established their open data initiative, now recognized as one of the most successful in the country. Prior to government, Denice co-directed the Data Center, a non-profit data intermediary. After Hurricane Katrina, she collaborated with Brookings to track the city’s recovery through the definitive New Orleans Index. She brought a data-driven approach to numerous post-Katrina community planning initiatives and co-founded the first new childcare center after the storm.
​Denice holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Arizona, where she was a Goldwater Scholar, and lives in the DC area with her spouse and four children.