Alexis Wichowski serves as press secretary for New York City’s newly created Department of Veterans’ Services and adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization.

Wichowski’s work experience includes the American Red Cross, the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy, the US mission to the UN, Oxford University Press, and a bunch of jobs doing web coding, theater producing, Chinese sitcom acting, and pretzel vending. She was a Presidential Management Fellow and studied in China on a Fulbright.

Wichowski regularly writes about media, technology and government, with publications such as, “Net states rule the world. Ignore them at your peril,” in WIRED; “Hack the bureaucracy: a user’s guide to getting things done in government,” in GovExec; “Social diplomacy, or how diplomats learned to stop worrying and love the tweet,” in Foreign Affairs; “What government can and should learn from hacker culture,” in The Atlantic; and a chapter in Digital Diplomacy: Theory & Practice, entitled “‘Secrecy is for losers’: why diplomats should embrace openness to protect national security.” She’s currently writing a book on how tech companies act like countries, to be published by Harper Collins in 2019.

Wichowski has a PhD in Information Science from University at Albany’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a BA in Chinese from Connecticut College. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, swims / bikes / runs, and reads science fiction voraciously.