Women With Impact #39 - Victoria Coleman
Welcome back to Women With Impact, a newsletter all about the journeys of mission-driven women and how they have a positive impact in our world.
I’m Clara Richter and this is the 39th edition of Women With Impact. If you enjoy this issue, please share it with a friend and like it above.
For this edition, I interviewed Dr. Victoria Coleman, Chief Scientist at the United States Air Force. Sworn into office in 2021, she is the most senior science and technology representative of the Department of the Air Force and her responsibilities include assessing scientific and technical matters affecting the Air Force mission. Victoria has 20+ years of experience in consumer and enterprise technology with strong expertise in the strategy and development of mobile platforms, web services, and software engineering. Previous to her current role, Victoria was the Director at DARPA, the CTO at The Wikimedia Foundation, and held roles at Yahoo, Nokia and HP, among others.
Wishing you a pleasant read!
Best,
Clara
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The Journey
Who are you and how do you spend your time?
I am Victoria Coleman and serve as the 37th Chief Scientist of the United States Air Force, part of the Department of Defense. My work involves across internal work within the department, as well as outside work: On the one hand, I am the primary representative of the Air Force to the world outside when it comes to technology, and on the other hand, I give advice to senior leadership at the Air Force on a variety of technology related topics. We are for instance working with the White House and the Chief Data and AI Office (CDAO) at the Department of Defense, to create an initiative to create training data sets to counter unintended bias in machine learning models including large language models (LLMs).
My main motivation is to make change. Change in our sector can sometimes be pretty quick, but sometimes it can take years to make change happen. I don’t get discouraged of how long a certain change may take; as long it is a significant change, count me in.
You did your Computer Science doctorate in the UK and started out your career in academia, what made you change industries? First in the tech sector at companies like Intel, and now at the US Department of Defense?
I spent almost a decade teaching at universities and I enjoyed it a great deal. But our science, Computer Science changes very fast and I wanted to be part of the community that is actually building out the solutions that can change the world, like the web for example. I believe you can best do that if you work in the industry.
Being part of mission-focused work is what I am driven by. That’s for instance also the reason why I worked for the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s Foundation, as the CTO.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
One recent accomplishment is the creation of the Microelectronic Commons, a USD 2 bn programme, that I helped create starting in 2015 at the University of California at Berkeley, and on which I am working on to this day. The investment programme helps create domestic systems level prototyping facilities to help bridge the lab to fab gap. The Commons is part of the CHIPS (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) Act, and forms the basis for accelerating the scaling of US semiconductor innovation. Without the Commons, the US would continue being reliant on foreign countries to prove out domestic innovations.
Another successful initiative I helped create is Project VENOM (Viper Experimentation and Next-generation Operations Model). It is all about bringing AI to the cockpit for our Air Force: from developing the AI in the lab to the implementation in the actual jets. We are engaged in testing how the AI works out in practice, progressing our autonomous software. Our Secretary at the Department of the Air Force recently flew in an AI enabled jet, and it was a big milestone.
The Lessons
What’s experience have you most grown from?
Learning from my mistakes. Over the years I learned to celebrate my mistakes. You will make mistakes so you might as well learn from them. Additionally, when it comes to mentoring and seeking advice, I am very thoughtful whom I seek council from. I choose individuals whom I deeply trust, align with my values and whom I look up to.
The Inspiration
Where do you get inspired from?
It’s a person whom I have never met: Nelson Mandela. I have several quotes from Mandela all over in my office, and I love to read them. His way of thinking was very compelling to me. He was a great leader and person. Above all, he personified grace and forgiveness. I very often think about the things he said or I read about him to learn more about his story. Valuing resilience is one thing that I learned from him.
In this context of resilience, one quote comes to mind: “Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.” There is so much truth to that: success is easy, what is not easy is getting back up on your feet and start running again when you mess up. What I strongly believe in is that once you see difficult situations in your life as opportunities to show that you are resilient, it can change the dynamics in your life.
What’s one last message you would like to share with our Women With Impact community?
I would like to end with a quote by Nelson Mandela: “Character is how you treat those that can do nothing for you.”
Enjoyed this or have any feedback? Let me know in the comments!
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