Tamara Roust

Dr. Tamara Roust is the Director of the Division of Data and Chief Data Officer at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a role she has held since October 2020. In her role, Dr. Roust is responsible for overseeing the agency’s enterprise data strategy and data governance approaches, including cloud migration, automation and artificial intelligence efforts and compliance with the Federal Data Strategy.

Prior to rejoining the CFTC, Dr. Roust served as Chief Data Officer for the State of Illinois where she developed the state’s enterprise data strategy and was a part of the state’s COVID-19 taskforce. As part of that effort, she developed automated solutions for transferring data from 1970s era IBM DB2 systems to cloud-native systems for contact tracing, so that hundreds of local health departments could connect to data stored within the state’s systems. From 2011-2016, Dr. Roust served as a Risk Analyst in the CFTC’s Division of Clearing and Risk (DCR), and from 2016-2019, as an Associate Director within DCR’s Examinations Branch, where she revised CFTC Regulations 39.18 and 39.36 to improve information security at Derivatives Clearing Organizations (DCOs).

She also has nearly a decade of experience in the financial services industry, holds several industry credentials, and worked as a senior engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dr. Roust holds several graduate degrees including a PhD in Management Information Systems from Claremont Graduate University and a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Most recently, she earned a certificate in Machine Learning from Stanford.