Congratulations to Women in Transport board member, Lauren Sager Weinstein, who has been presented with the award of UK Chief Data Officer of the Year by CDO Club, the world's largest community of C-suite digital and data leaders.
This is the second accolade Lauren has achieved in one month, having just been named by Data IQ as the 7th most influential person in the data driven business.
Lauren is currently Chief Data Officer at Transport for London (TfL) where part of her role is to lead TfL in using its vast amounts of system data to transform how it plans and operates transport in London. In a single day, TfL collects 19 million smartcard ticketing transactions, 4.5 million bus location events, and 5.2 billion records from SCOOT traffic detectors. Lauren and her team of developers and data scientists transform that flow of data into analytic tools to better run and plan the transport network, improving the experience for customers.
Lauren's career with TfL began 15 years ago as a Senior Business Planner, working on TfL’s first organisational business plans. Since then she has had a variety of roles and worked on a range of projects, incuding analysis of transport during the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and the launch of the contactless payment system across London’s transport network. More than 1.5 billion journeys have been made using this innovative technology, which is now being introduced in other world cities such as New York, Boston and Miami.
Originally from Washington, DC, Lauren has a degree from Princeton University and a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University. She has worked with the City of Los Angeles and RAND, a non-profit institution that helps improve policy and decision making through research and analysis.
Presenting the award CDO Club founder, David Mathison, said “Lauren's academic and vocational experience has been dedicated to making cities better and smarter, and providing practical benefits for citizens through the intelligent application of data and insights.
"Lauren and TfL also understand the importance of privacy and safeguarding personal customer data.”
Mike Brown MVO, London's Transport Commissioner, said: "It's fantastic that Lauren has received this award, which is a testament to the work that Lauren and her team do to improve customers' journeys in London. She is an inspiring role model and I hope this will encourage more people, particularly women and other under-represented groups of people, to explore the career opportunities on offer working with data."
Lauren responded: "I am thrilled to be recognised by the CDO Club as the UK Chief Data Officer of the Year. It's a huge honour and I love that I am able to use data to make a difference to people's lives every day."
This is the first-ever Chief Data Officer of the Year awarded in the U.K. In previous years the US award has been given to data officer such as Dr. D.J. Patil, former Chief Data Scientist at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Dr.Inderpal Bhandari, Global Chief Data Officer for IBM.
For information about the CDO club visit: http://CDOClub.com.