According to an email from a Connecticut state government spokesman, Gaul started work with the state’s Office of Policy and Management on Nov. 4. His LinkedIn profile lists 20 years of private-sector and nonprofit experience, most recently as director of research and evaluation at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.
Prior to working at the foundation, Gaul was an analyst and product developer at Microfinance Information eXchange, a risk consultant at The World Bank, and an analyst at a pair of investment firms. He has a master’s degree in international economics and international development from Johns Hopkins University, and a bachelor’s in mathematics from the University of Chicago.
Gaul was unavailable for an interview before press time.
Gaul is Connecticut’s second chief data officer after Kleykamp, who assumed the role in 2014 and helped shape it before leaving three months ago to work with the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation.
Kleykamp told Government Technology in September that much of his work as state CDO was focused on open data, of which Connecticut was an early adopter. Kleykamp was also a founding member and chairman of the State CDO Network, a voluntary, self-organized professional support group for state CDOs that had its first meeting in November.
As Gaul gets acquainted with Connecticut’s data environment, he’ll do so with an ostensibly supportive governor. Since he assumed office in January, even amid cuts in other departments, Gov. Ned Lamont has pushed for increased investment in information technology. Primarily, he wants Connecticut to digitize services such as voter registration and driver’s license renewal. This fall, Lamont also touted the beginning of construction on an energy and data center in the city of New Britain, a $1 billion project which he hopes will win contracts from major cloud providers like Google and Microsoft, due for completion in 2021.
