Emery Csulak takes up chief data officer role at Department of Energy
The Department of Energy has named senior IT official Emery Csulak as chief data officer.
He started work in the role April 11 and moves into the post after serving as principal deputy chief information officer at the agency.
Before this, Csulak was deputy CIO for cybersecurity and CISO at the department, and earlier in his career served as CISO and senior official for privacy at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The chief data officer role at the Department of Energy has remained vacant since at least January 2021, and was previously carried out on an acting basis by multiple senior technology officials.
In the new post, Csulak will be tasked with fostering a more innovative approach to the department’s vast array of datasets, while also protecting the highly sensitive information it holds.
Speaking at the ACT-IAC 2021 Imagine Nation conference last November, Energy CIO Ann Dunkin highlighted this dual challenge. She said: “We have so much data across the Department of Energy (DOE), and the challenge is to figure out how to move data between our labs and share it while still maintaining that propriety sense our labs each have about their data.”
Dunkin added at the time that the range of information held by the agency – from open science to nuclear security information – makes this especially challenging.
The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment.
