President Joe Biden has selected Clare Martorana as his federal CIO, the White House announced Tuesday.

Martorana takes on the federal CIO role within the Office of Management and Budget after serving for more than two years as the CIO of the Office of Personnel Management.

She got her start in government during the waning months of the Obama administration as a digital services expert on the U.S. Digital Service team, with a focus on digital modernization at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Prior to that, she served in leadership roles at Everyday Health and WebMD.

“Throughout her career, Clare Martorana worked to improve and simplify the digital experiences people have when interacting with businesses and government,” says the White House announcement. It goes on to credit her for her time at OPM “where for the past two years she stabilized and secured agency operations to deliver better digital-first services for the Federal workforce.”

Martorana is the first to hold the role of federal CIO under the Biden administration. Until now, Maria Roat, deputy federal CIO, had been serving in the role in an acting capacity. She is preceded in the role by Suzette Kent during the Trump administration. Basil Parker, another OPM transplant, also held the role for a brief period at the end of the last administration.

As federal CIO, one of Martorana’s biggest priorities will be leading federal agencies in the ongoing response efforts to COVID-19. In particular, the Biden administration has placed an emphasis on using the Technology Modernization Fund as a vehicle to drive needed digital transformation in support of digital services and recovery. The TMF could see as much as $1 billion in funding under the next pandemic relief bill.

Management of federal cybersecurity will also fall under Martorana’s purview to some degree. She will work with Chris DeRusha, newly hired federal CISO, in the federal response to the recent SolarWinds breach and the broader security of federal networks.

Martorana was a recipient of a 2020 FedScoop 50 Federal Leadership Award.

Her deputy at OPM, Guy Cavallo, will take over as acting CIO with her departure.

The executive order on trustworthy artificial intelligence issued by President Trump in December has encouraged agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs to share best practices.

The VA’s National AI Institute is working with other VA components, like the Data Governance Council and Veteran Engagement Board, as well as outside agencies to create an AI use case catalog, said Gil Alterovitz, director of AI at VA.

The trustworthy AI executive order set the process in motion by requiring the retirement of AI applications that didn’t meet a set of minimum standards and setting deadlines for inventorying and sharing agency use cases.

“It’s really enabled agencies to learn from each other,” Alterovitz said during the SNG Live: Enhancing AI in Government event presented by FedScoop. “In interacting with other agencies through different councils we’ve been able to learn about and share different AI use cases.”

VA is further looking to pilot a set of modules that can be added to an internal review board on AI, Alterovitz said.

Before researchers build AI models, they’ll go through a voluntary checklist for planning purposes. The checklist builds on the work of VA’s National Center for Ethics in Health Care and the Food and Drug Administration and will encourage safeguarding research participants and veterans’ data, as well as training data to eliminate bias.

VA developed an initial AI module to assist its hundreds of medical centers nationally with COVID-19 individual risk prediction by analyzing morbidity and mortality data over time. Explainable AI was leveraged to help patients understand their risk of illness.

New, post-hospitalization data is being fed into those statistical models for additional insights to inform treatment decisions at a dozen rural and urban pilot sites, Alterovitz said.