Alex Engler
Executive Director at Penn Center on Media, Technology, and Democracy
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAlex Engler is an experienced policy and data science leader who currently serves as the inaugural Executive Director of the Penn Center on Media, Technology, and Democracy, translating cutting‑edge research into practical strategies to strengthen information ecosystems and democratic resilience. Over 12 years he has bridged academia, government, and think tanks—most recently at the White House as Director for Technology and Democracy and Assistant Director for AI Policy—shaping U.S. and transatlantic approaches to AI governance. He has designed and led graduate programs in data science for public policy, founded data infrastructure and analytics teams at research institutions, and won competitive grants to scale policy-relevant computation. A Fulbright‑Schuman Innovation Scholar with hands-on experience advising German federal data policy and analyzing the EU AI Act, he blends technical fluency in data science with nuanced regulatory insight. Known for turning complex models and cloud infrastructure into actionable public-sector tools, he also teaches data visualization and AI governance to the next generation of policymakers. Based in Philadelphia, he combines practitioner experience in government with a scholar’s rigor, often surfacing nonobvious tradeoffs between transparency, governance, and technological capability.
13 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Economics, Bachelor's degree Economics at American UniversityMaster of Public Policy, Master of Public Policy at Georgetown UniversityMaster of Science in Predictive Analytics, Master of Science in Predictive Analytics at Northwestern University
Github Skills (6)
trainings9
pyspark9
r8
rstudio8
spark7
code-generation5
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
UrbanInstitute/R-Trainings
Feb 2016 - Apr 2017
Storing code and related documents for Urban Institute R trainings.
Contributions:14 commits, 11 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 2 months
storingrstatstrainingsinstituteurban
UrbanInstitute/pyspark-tutorials
Jun 2016 - May 2017
Code snippets and tutorials for working with social science data in PySpark
Contributions:21 commits, 16 pushes, 2 branches in 11 months
pyspark
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