Session(s)

A Career in STEM: New Frontiers and Adventures

Ms. Norris serves as the Director, Center for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the National Institutes of Health. As the NIH CIO, she provides oversight of NIH’s $1 billion IT portfolio that supports scientific research and discovery. She also oversees the implementation of NIH’s STRIDES (Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability) Initiative, which establishes partnerships with commercial cloud service providers to reduce economic and technological barriers to accessing and computing on large biomedical data sets to accelerate biomedical advances.

As the Director, Center for Information Technology, she is responsible for managing a broad range of NIH-wide information and information technology services, including a 100-gigabit high-speed research network infrastructure, a high-performance scientific computing system ranked as one of the top supercomputers in the world by TOP500, collaboration and communication platforms and tools, bioinformatics research programs, business solutions and applications, and 24 x7 operations of NIH’s distributed IT environment.

Prior to her tenure at NIH, Ms. Norris spent more than 10 years at the National Science Foundation (NSF), where, in her roles as Acting CIO and Director of IT services, she was responsible for establishing the foundation’s strategy, policies, and programs and managing its information technology systems and services. One of her most notable roles before joining NSF, was the Deputy Chief Information Officer for Management for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), where she provided senior leadership and management of NASA’s complex $2 billion information technology portfolio. Prior to joining the federal government, Ms. Norris was a management consultant at Booz, Allen & Hamilton and served on the President’s Private Sector Commission on Cost Control.

In 2020, Ms. Norris was selected as a Fellow in the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA). In 2019, she received the Presidential Rank Award from the White House and the Senior Executives Association. She also received the President’s Meritorious Service Award in 2008.