Beach, Thomas

As the interim Chief Data Officer (CDO) at the Department of Commerce, Thomas leads the Department’s data governance activities; executes key data collection, inventory and quality processes; and provides strategic direction and guidance for the bureaus’ collection, storage, use, and access for their data assets across twelve bureaus/offices.  Thomas chairs the Department’s Commerce Data Governance Board and leads implementation of the Federal Data Strategy and represents the Department on the new Federal CDO Council.

At the United State Patent & Trademark Office, Thomas served as the Chief Data Strategist and led the team to create the agency’s first production artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms deliverables in particular for patent examination related to classification and searching.  Also, Thomas lead the creation the USPTO Data Guild (Governance Board) to provide oversight on data inventory, data quality and privacy/security concerns enterprise wide with continual assessment of maturity.

Thomas has served on the team creating the Federal Data Strategy as part of the Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goal: Leveraging Data as a Strategic Asset of part of the President’s Management Agenda. Thomas also served as USPTO’s lead on Cancer Moonshot Task Force Data Working Group incentivizing external teams to exploit patent data in novel ways through challenge that enhanced our understanding of the links between cancer research, invention, and commercialized therapies.

A graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Engineering, Beach received his Master’s Degree from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.  He has been a guest speaker at the White House Open Data Summit, Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech, and the Harvard Business School. Thomas was nominated for FedScoop Top 50 Federal Leaders of 2018 and appeared on Government Matters – Tech Leadership Series (09/13/18).