Lewis Shepherd is the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments, based in Washington DC. The Institute focuses on innovative solutions to major enterprise-wide problems of national, state, and local governments, leveraging Microsoft’s $7 billion annual R&D budget.

Mr. Shepherd’s career includes work in government at the federal, state, and local levels, and fifteen years in the private sector in Silicon Valley. For four years (2004-2007), Shepherd was Senior Technology Officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and led R&D for next-generation technology for the Department of Defense intelligence community, which has an information technology (IT) budget in excess of $1 billion per year. He was responsible for information management strategic planning and served as the senior consultant for the director of DIA on technology innovation, overseeing business case analyses and evaluating technology investments for the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in conjunction with other agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community. Shepherd was promoted to the federal government’s Senior Executive Service in February 2006. According to ComputerWorld magazine in 2007, “DIA and other defense agencies have become the most advanced users of Web 2.0 tools in the federal government."

Lewis Shepherd was educated at Stella Maris College in Gzira, Malta, and St. Mary’s College in Galway, Ireland. He received a B.A. in Government and Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia (CLAS ’82), graduating with Honors; a post-graduate degree in French from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium); and a Master’s degree in Political Science from Stanford University. During three years of study in the Ph.D. program at Stanford from 1984-1987, he worked on contract as a Soviet foreign policy analyst in the Office of Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. He was a graduate teaching fellow for undergraduate classes at Stanford and the University of Virginia, and has been a guest lecturer for MBA courses at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

During the late 1980s and 1990s he held senior public and private executive positions in California, including serving as Director of Communications for the Mayor of San Francisco and senior policy advisor to the Mayor of San Jose, California (known as “the Capital of Silicon Valley”). From 1998-2000 he was Vice President of Clinton Reilly Group, a leading West Coast government consulting firm, and from 2000-2003 was an executive with a successful Silicon Valley artificial-intelligence startup company.

Mr. Shepherd was the recipient of the 2005 DIA Medal for Meritorious Civilian Service, and the Government Computing News 2007 “National IT Leadership” award. He has previously received a Ford Foundation Fellowship in International Security, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship for study overseas, and the 1988 National Press Club Annual Authors Award. He has coauthored two books on U.S. and international politics, and published numerous articles on public affairs. He lives in Virginia’s Northern Neck with his wife Kathryn, an attorney and lecturer at the U.S. Supreme Court.