Nick Sinai

Nick Sinai served as Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and head instructor of DPI-663.  Nick came to Harvard from the Obama White House, where he was U.S. Deputy CTO.  Nick’s research, writing, and teaching are focused on technology and innovation in government—including co-authoring a 2016 Harvard Business School case about the U.S. Digital Service, and Belfer Center research papers about human-centered policymaking, digital services for Veterans, and modernizing the regulatory state.  

Nick is a senior fellow at the Technology and Public Purpose Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Nick served as a faculty affiliate of the Shorenstein Center, where he was the inaugural Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow, researching and writing about data as a public good.

Nick is an advisor to the Harvard Open Data Project, a student-faculty group that aims to increase transparency and solve problems on campus using public Harvard data.  Nick is a Senior Advisor at Insight Partners and a board member of BrightBytes.

Nick is an advisor to Coding It Forward, a student-led nonprofit that runs the Civic Digital Fellowship, a new pipeline into public service for technology students. Nick is also an advisor to Upsolve, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that improves consumer access to Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection.

2020 Course Assistants

David Leftwich

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, David is a second-year student in the Master in Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with dual degrees in political science and psychology. During his undergraduate career, David interned with USAID, U.S. Congress, the Hudson Institute, and the State Department focusing on technology and economic development. At the Kennedy School, David is focusing on technology and innovation in government. Outside of his coursework, he is a course assistant for “Digital Government: Technology, Policy, and Public Service Innovation,” “Policy Design and Delivery” and “Tech and Innovation in Government.” He is also a Programming Chair for the HBS/HKS Social Enterprise Conference, and a Harvard Graduate School Leadership Initiative Fellow. This past summer, he worked as a consultant in Deloitte’s federal government practice focusing on strategy and analytics.

Bobby Wang

Bobby first came to the US from New Zealand to study product design at RISD, subsequently working as both a designer and engineer on a variety of projects ranging from furniture and graphic design to medical devices and consumer electronics. He quickly realized that people, communities, and places were what interested him, which led him to the Harvard Graduate School of Design under the masters in urban planning (MUP) and design technology (MDes conc. Tech) programs to explore the question of how do we design and guide emergent technologies to make our cities more equitable and livable? His recent work ranges from using open geospatial data to understand the relationship between pedestrian safety, race, income, and age, to autonomous vehicle strategies optimized for economic justice and inclusion— indulging in equal parts the deep technical challenges we face today and the broad, conceptual visions of the future.

2020 Research Assistants

Ariana Soto

Ariana Soto is a senior at Harvard College studying Government on the Technology Science Track with a secondary in Computer Science. She has spent summers at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Information Technology Bureau, the Los Angeles Mayor’s Data Office, and the New York Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics working on projects which included data analysis, internal system audits, and policy recommendations to name a few. For the past two years she has served as project manager at the non-profit Coding it Forward to empower the next generation of technology leaders to create social change, primarily through their pilot initiative the Civic Digital Fellowship–a first-of-its-kind technology internship in the federal government. She is looking forward to continuing to work at the intersection of civic technology post-graduation in whichever capacity that may be. Ariana is from sunny Los Angeles and when she’s not doing all things data or civic tech you’ll find her performing on-stage or playing a game of soccer.

Miroslav Bergam

Miroslav Bergam is a member of the Harvard College Class of 2023. Miro is from New Jersey and currently lives in Greenough Hall. He is interested in data science, policy, journalism, and the humanities. Miro currently serves as a co-chair of the IOP's Environmental Policy Research Team, a member of the Harvard Open Data Project, and a staff writer for Fifteen Minutes Magazine. 

Thank you to everyone who has made this course possible, including: Angel Quicksey, Chante Lantos-Swett, Stephanie Nguyen, Brian Lefler, Kate Spies, Jon Truong, Sydney McDonald, Sophie Schick, Hadley DeBello, Alisha Ukani, Dana Chisnell, Mary Ann Brody, Ryan Panchadsaram, Kate Krontiris, Ben Getson, Ben Willman, Eric Waldo, Erie Meyer, Marina Martin, Wendy Lin, Brandon Ward, Jess Colarossi, Eduardo Ortiz, Arden Klemmer, Hong Qu, Mina Hsiang, Kathy Pham, and all of our past students and clients.