Layne Morrison

Layne Morrison is detailed as the Acting Deputy Chief Data Officer, Analytics & Infrastructure Division (AID), at the U.S. Department of Education. Within the Office of the CDO, she is responsible for advancing the strategic use of data at the Department of Education and Federal Student Aid.

Morrison leads ED’s AID, which comprises two workstreams: The Data Infrastructure and Support team delivers enterprise level analytics tools, while the Analytics and Evaluation Team of data scientists develops innovative analysis and visualization projects, in emerging innovation areas such as dashboards, natural language processing and webscraping. AID also supports offices across the agency in data and analytics skills through the Department’s Data Literacy and Data Science Training programs.

Morrison previously led ED’s pioneering Data Literacy program, fostering confidence and competence with data and encouraging all staff to “speak data” together. She also is responsible for staff upskilling mid-career federal professionals through ED’s 9-month, intensive Data Science Training Program. She supports data and analytics in all major grantmaking offices at ED, through ongoing internal consulting projects and shoulder-to-shoulder mentoring in analytics, evaluation, visualization and data science.

Before joining ED in 2020, Morrison spent 15 years at IBM, most recently as a Service Area Manager and Senior Managing Consultant, where she managed over a dozen advanced analytics projects in IBM’s federal practice, ranging from predictive analytics and datamining to operations research. She previously worked in research, grants management, and donor relations at the University of California, Berkeley, most recently has Manager of Development for the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences.

She earned her Master of Science in Public Policy & Management at Carnegie Mellon University and her BA in Political Science at Mills College.