Vanessa is the Chief Technology Officer for the City of Boston. She is a justice-oriented technologist and career public servant with over 25 years of experience in a variety of domains including public and private higher education, Federal research, and international software. She was also a successful brick-and-mortar entrepreneur who sold her business in 2019. She has developed and managed healthy and successful teams in engineering, operations, analytics, business analysis, UX, QA, product management, and project management and is honored and delighted to be a part of the City of Boston leadership team enabling services that make lives better for constituents and staff.

Prior to joining the City of Boston, Vanessa was the Head of People, Finance and Administration at Stanford Impact Labs, Stanford University. As a member of the leadership team, her work included the design of Stanford Impact Lab policy, the management of multi-year investments across +25 impact labs, recruiting oversight, development of staff incentivization structures, government program advising, and designing robust processes for partners and staff.

Before Stanford, Vanessa was the Director of Planning and Analysis in Advancement at the University of California, Berkeley, where she led an experienced enterprise technology team to support the groundbreaking Light the Way campaign in raising an unprecedented 7.37 billion dollars, the largest total in history for any public university and for any university without a medical school. Prior to that, she was a Senior Manager in Research, Teaching, and Learning at University of California, Berkeley, where she oversaw the creation, design, and campus wide adoption of an award-winning cloud-based learning analytics platform. She also created and managed the Technical Project Office and managed User Experience.

Vanessa has a BA in English Literature and an MS in Information Systems both from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a lifelong learner with certifications in Agile, Design Thinking, Restorative Justice, Six Sigma, UX, Holistic Medicine, and is a graduate of the Aspen Policy Academy at the Aspen Institute. She is also a published author and her work supporting women and historically underrepresented people to be successful in IT is widely cited.

Originally from Los Angeles, California, and identifying as Latinx, Vanessa has deep roots in the California Bay Area. This is the first time that she has lived outside of California. Her family includes her partner of over 23 years and twin teenage boys. She is also a parent to a mischievous Husky rescue pup named Luna.