NIH taps former data chief Kristen Honey as first partnerships officer

The National Institutes of Health selected Kristen Honey, a longtime government data and technology official, to head up its coordination of public-private research partnerships. 

In a social media post, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT announced Honey as the inaugural official in the NIH role. As part of her duties, Honey will help “to build robust partnership models, reduce duplication, improve transparency, and move promising ideas from concept to execution with greater speed and consistency in collaboration with” ONC and across the department, per the post.

The chief partnerships officer role is housed in the Office of the Director’s Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, per the post.

“The ‘wicked problems’ that I run toward—complex, interdisciplinary challenges no one wants to own and that require cross-sector solutions—just got bigger. Joining NIH as Chief Partnerships Officer,” Honey said in a LinkedIn post.

Honey has served in various HHS and White House roles over the past decade — including as HHS’s chief data officer. Honey was initially installed as CDO after President Joe Biden’s administration reorganization of its IT, data and artificial intelligence portfolio. 

Her time as CDO, however, appears to have ended after the Trump administration undid that reorganization in March, per her LinkedIn. Since then, she has listed her role as senior executive service. Currently, Arman Sharma, HHS’s deputy chief AI officer, is listed as the agency’s top data official on the CDO Council webpage. 

Spokespeople for HHS’s public affairs office, NIH and ONC did not respond to multiple attempts to clarify details about the CDO role.

Honey, who has a Ph.D. from Stanford in environment and resources, previously worked in federal data and IT policy roles in the White House under both President Barack Obama and during President Donald Trump’s first term. She then joined HHS, where she was an innovator in residence, helped establish the agency’s CDO office, and was part of the agency’s testing and diagnostics efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Honey later was chief data scientist and executive director of the agency’s InnovationX, which was designed to work on solutions to “wicked problems” by creating public-private coalitions and leveraging cross-sector resources.