Cristin Ann Dorgelo is the senior advisor for management at the White House Office of Management and Budget. Dorgelo is the president emeritus of the Association of Science and Technology Centers, where she previously served as president and CEO. Dorgelo served as the chief of staff at the Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Barack Obama White House.
Education and early career
Dorgelo grew up in Southern California. She studied at University of California, Los Angeles. She earned a bachelor's degree in history with a minor in anthropology. She worked at the Los Angeles Times from 1996 to 1999, in advertising operations. She was part of the Leadership and Organizational Development group at Times Mirror, managing professional and organizational development programs, until Times Mirror merged with Tribune Co. in 2000.
Career
Dorgelo was a project manager at Idealab from 2000 to 2004, helping to launch several startup companies. While at Idealab, she was part of the founding team of X1 Technologies, and she worked as X1's director of operations until 2006. Dorgelo was part of the X Prize Foundation, between 2006 and 2012, where as vice president of prize operations she managed the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, the $10million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, the $10 million Archon Genomics X PRIZE, the $2.5 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge and the $2.4 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge.
Dorgelo joined the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2012, where she served until the end of the Obama Administration in 2017. As assistant director for Grand Challenges from 2012 to 2014, she helped Federal agencies engage in open innovation by offering incentive prizes, challenges, and crowdsourcing programs, including on Challenge.gov, which won the 2013 “Innovations in American Government Award” from Harvard's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. She released three reports from the Office of Science and Technology Policy to Congress on the use of prizes and challenges by Federal agencies under the America COMPETES Act of 2010. She spoke at the 2012 South by Southwest conference on the role of prizes and challenges in catalyzing innovation and engaging citizen solvers, and at a Washington Post event on the role of public-private partnerships. She supported the federal Challenges and Prizes Community of Practice.
With Thomas Kalil, Dorgelo led the White House's "Grand Challenges". Incentive prizes and Grand Challenges were both part of Barack Obama's innovation strategy, aiming to catalyze breakthroughs towards national priorities. The Obama Administration's Grand Challenges included the BRAIN Initiative, the United States Department of Energy SunShot Initiative and EV Everywhere Challenge, NASA's Asteroid Grand Challenge and United States Agency for International Development Grand Challenge for Development. She was interested in engaging citizens broadly in efforts to address Grand Challenges. Through her role in the Grand Challenges she became interested in citizen engagement. In 2013 she delivered a FED Talk on engaging the public in Grand Challenges, and in 2014, she delivered a keynote address on Grand Challenges at the Department of Energy's SunShot Grand Challenge Summit. She was named a “Tech Titan” in 2013 by Washingtonian Magazine, and in 2014 Fedscoop named her one of Washington DC's “Top 50 Women in Tech". Dorgelo helped start "We the Geeks," a White House series of Google Hangouts that highlighted the future of science, technology, and innovation here in the United States.