For two decades, Ben Cushing has been a leader in emerging technology solutions across multiple industries and is committed to radical innovation in healthcare. Before joining Red Hat, he served as the Chief Technology Officer for MDLogix, a behavioral health IT firm supporting Johns Hopkins Medicine. There he architected and brought to market a behavioural health cloud platform for use with employer, healthcare, and education markets.

In addition to supporting analytics and operations at the National Institutes of Health for 6 years, Cushing had the opportunity to practice a scaled agile framework with Accenture where he led the technical architecture and design for the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) Electronic Health Management Platform, an industry leading Health Management and Care Coordination platform serving 9 million patients.

His tenure at Accenture began with the acquisition of Agilex, where he designed LSI solutions, developed systems to automate the Post-9/11 GI bill, and supported in-theater data collection and analytics tools. While at Agilex, Ben architected and led the development of a mobile Software Development Kit, still in use today by the VA to produce more than 60 applications.

Matt Lawson is the Director of Solution Engineering for NetApp’s U.S. Federal business, where he leads high-performing solution engineering teams focused on data, AI, and mission outcomes. He helps government agencies move beyond pilots by modernizing data platforms that enable enterprise AI, accelerate hybrid and multi-cloud adoption, and create secure, resilient, intelligent data infrastructures for mission execution. With more than 20 years of public-sector IT leadership experience, including serving as a CTO and Vice President of Information Technology, Matt brings a practitioner’s lens to moderating conversations on what it really takes to operationalize and secure data at scale in the federal government. He is based in Richmond, Virginia.

Scott Ostrowski is the Vice President of CTO Operations at Peraton, Inc.  In this role, Scott is responsible for implementing the Chief Technology Officer’s technology strategy and advancing Peraton’s research and development (R&D) and technology transfer portfolios. He also manages Peraton Labs operations, a customer funded advanced research organization solving the toughest national security problems.  Combining the Lab’s contracted R&D with Peraton’s internal R&D, Scott oversees an annual portfolio of $235M.

Scott has 25 years of technical leadership and mission delivery experience in diverse markets including cyber operations, data analytics, and national security through a combination of military service, early-stage tech start-ups, and federal system integrators.  Prior to Peraton, Scott helped build several tech start-ups: first as Chief Customer Officer at Enveil, a privacy enhancing security company, and then as Vice President of Federal at Latent AI, an MLOps and edge AI technology. Previously, Scott was a Chief Technologist at Booz Allen Hamilton where he filled diverse roles such as Technical Director of a major cryptanalysis contract and Program Manager of a large-scale, cyber analytics portfolio.

Scott retired from the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve after 20 years of combined active duty/reserve service. He holds a M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech, a M.S. in Strategic Intelligence from the National Intelligence University, and a B.S. in Operations Research from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.