Tyrone Grandison

Leader of the IBM team that pioneered research in Relational Database Privacy, Grandison demonstrated that privacy protection was possible at the database level and that both security and privacy controls can exist in a common infrastructure. Dr. Grandison is also the Founder of the Data-Driven Institute, a public health non-profit that helps communities and businesses transform raw data into insights, products, policy, and application. Dr. Grandison was also a 2018 Zhi-Xing Eisenhower Fellow. He served as the first-ever Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Grandison also advised the Government of Jamaica on their Information Technology strategy as a member of the National Information and Communications Technology Advisory Council (2016–18).

He served as Deputy Chief Data Officer (dCDO) at the US Department of Commerce (2015–16), where he co-founded the Commerce Data Service — a data startup within the Department that supported its twelve bureaus — and led the successful rollout of its first 15 products. He was also a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow (2014–15), working with the US Department of Labor and the US Census Bureau on their data and API (application programming interface) initiatives. Grandison has served as CEO of Proficiency Labs International, which specialized in supporting organizations design, build, and evaluate privacy and security solutions for their systems. He has been one of the managing partners of METIS, Inc. — a services company that specialized in solving organizational problems.

He co-founded woyhd.org, a service to help consumers determine the privacy awareness of mobile healthcare apps. He was the co-founder of Hipaantrepreneurs, a service to help healthcare professionals with compliance with healthcare law. Grandison was one of the founding chairs of the Diversity in Privacy and Security Seminar (Di-PaSS) series, which sought to increase the number of minority professionals and researchers in the privacy and security space.

He was a founding partner of Wonder Women Hacks, a hackathon dedicated to increasing the number of women in tech, providing a support system for female technologists, and helping to solve issues relevant to women. He was also a founding partner of Hacks for Humanity (a collaboration with Arizona State University's Project Humanities), which sought to develop technology to reconnect people to their humanity. Grandison has served as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Technology in Kingston, Jamaica, and has been the CTO and co-founder of EqualityTV, where he led the platform and technical strategy initiatives.

Dr. Grandison has over 25 years of experience in software engineering, security, and privacy. His work in database security and privacy is internationally recognized as pioneering and impactful. In addition to relational data privacy and security, Grandison created and successfully led research and product initiatives in RFID data management, privacy-preserving mobile data management, private social network analysis, text analytics, and healthcare management systems.

His career started as a software engineer in Jamaica. He received a B.S. degree in Computer Studies (Computer Science and Economics) from the University of the West Indies in 1997, an M.S. degree in Software Engineering in 1998, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Imperial College of Science, Technology & Medicine in London in 2003.

Dr. Grandison is an IBM Master Inventor, a Distinguished Engineer of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS), and a Fellow of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). Grandison was recognized by FedScoop as "The Most Inspiring Up & Comer" in the US Government (2015), by the National Society of Black Engineers as Pioneer of the Year in 2009, and by the Black Engineer of the Year Award Board as Modern Day Technology Leader in 2009, Minority in Science Trailblazer in 2010, and Science Spectrum Trailblazer in 2012 and 2013. He was further recognized by Federal Computer Weekly as a "Rising Star" (2016) and by the Institute for Education as "High Impact Presidential Innovation Fellow" (2016), and received the IEEE Technical Achievement Award in 2010 for "pioneering contributions to Secure and Private Data Management."

He has authored over 100 technical papers, co-invented over 47 patents, and wrote several books, including "Practical Privacy Protection Online for Free," "Trust Management Middleware for Internet Applications: Combining Trust, Recommendation, Risk and Experience," and "Cybersecurity Risk Assessment for Business."