Katherine B. Nammacher

Katherine is a product manager with the Office of Innovation team, where she works on the Business Experience Initiative. In this capacity, she leads a team that explores how emerging technology - including generative artificial intelligence - can provide new ways to support internal teams, business owners, and New Jerseyans.

Katherine has worked in government technology since 2015. While at the United States Digital Service at the White House, she improved the asylum process, designed a permanent office that improved the federal hiring process, and helped mitigate identify fraud in unemployment insurance. She also taught a ground-breaking class in Georgetown’s graduate public policy program focused on how program and policy development can incorporate qualitative and quantitative data-driven decisions, iterative design techniques, and be more user-centered.

Prior to USDS, Katherine led a start-up, taking the company from its founding, onto the Y Combinator accelerator program, and eventually to a successful acquisition. The start-up focused on building software that de-escalated 911 interactions between police and people experiencing severe mental health issues, chemical dependencies, and homelessness. She has also worked at Code for America and in a leading technology company’s civic innovation program.

Before working in government technology, she conducted user research at various museums, including the Exploratorium and Oakland Museum of California. She also volunteered with AmeriCorps NCCC after college.

Katherine has a Bachelors of Fine Arts, focused in Printmaking and Curatorial Studies, from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She received training in founding companies and growing businesses at Y Combinator as part of their accelerator program. In mid-2022, she took a year to travel internationally, visiting all 7 continents. You can also find her skiing, swimming in lakes and the ocean, doing jigsaw puzzles, backpacking, making visual art, reading science fiction or historical fiction, and observing nature intentionally and slowly.