Dr. Jackie Kazil is the Director of Geospatial Solutions at Bana Solutions, where she drives applied research and GIS initiatives. A former White House Presidential Innovation Fellow, she played a pivotal role in supporting the co-founding of 18F and championing “open by default” government initiatives.

Dr. Kazil is a Python Software Foundation (PSF) Fellow and a former member of its Board of Directors. She has been a key leader in numerous open-source community efforts, from scaling PyLadies internationally to founding GeoDC, a hub for geospatial professionals in Washington, D.C.

She is the author of Data Wrangling with Python (O’Reilly) and the creator of Mesa, the leading complexity modeling library in Python. Dr. Kazil holds a Ph.D. in Computational Social Science from George Mason University.