Title: Meet GAO's New Chief Scientist Description: GAO publishes reports
and provides technical assistance to Congress to help members understand
the emerging technology and science issues and potential policy options.
We recently named a new chief scientist to help lead this work. Met our
new Chief Scientist Sterling Thomas by listening to this podcast. 

Released: December 2023

[MUSIC]

[Sterling Thomas:] GAO is really focused on improving Americans lives
and doing that by supporting Congress and making sure the government's
being responsible in the way they use science and technology.

[Holly Hobbs:] Hi and welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report. Your source for
fact-based, nonpartisan news and information from the U.S. Government
Accountability Office. I'm your host, Holly Hobbs. Science and
technology are rapidly changing our world. Here at GAO, we recognize the
importance of the potential gains and risks of these advancements, and
we publish reports and provide technical assistance to Congress to help
members understand these emerging issues and their potential policy
options. Today, I'll introduce you to GAO's new chief scientist Sterling
Thomas, who works in our Science Technology Assessment and Analytics
team, or STAA. Welcome to GAO and thanks for joining us.

[Sterling Thomas:] Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

[Holly Hobbs:] So, Sterling, maybe we can start with what does it mean
to be the chief scientist at GAO? What's your role?

[Sterling Thomas:] GAO is a little bit of a different organization than
I've usually been at. So, I came from a science and technology
organization called Noblis, and I was their chief scientist for about
six years. And my role there was really focused on guiding their
research programs. So, they had research programs and laboratories, the
types of things you think about and science and technology. And GAO is
much more of an ideas organization. But science and technology permeates
all of the things we do. So you think about the reports that we put out,
the audits that we do, each of them has a science and technology
component because the United States federal government does a lot of
science. And a lot of the policies Congress comes up with are based off
of science and technology trends that are going on at the time or needs
that citizens have. And so my role at GAO is really to help guide that
science and technology component of all the work we do, in addition to
supporting the STAA organization, and developing science and technology
reports, and ideas that can be shared with Congress. 

[Holly Hobbs:] So what did you—you touched on this a little bit? What
did you do before GAO?

[Sterling Thomas:] So, for almost 14 years I was at Noblis. And there I
had served many roles, but for the last six years or so, I've been their
chief scientist. And my roles there range from, the senior scientist to
principal investigator. But in the end, what I did there is I ran
science, everything from running research programs, developing
technology that's important for their clients to the end is their chief
scientist helping with the strategy and the goals and developing and
running their research program broadly. Before that, I was at Virginia
Commonwealth University doing research programs, and I've done startups
in the same domain. 

[Holly Hobbs:] I was also at Virginia Commonwealth University, so we can
give VCU a nice shout out.

[Sterling Thomas:] Absolutely.

[Holly Hobbs:] So when you were in school or, you know, even post
postgraduate, did you focus on a specific area study or science?

[Sterling Thomas:] Yeah, so my specific area of study was genetics, and
specifically bioinformatics. And you know a little bit about
bioinformatics and this was really interesting that got me into it. And
I was part of an NIH fellowship program that I was involved in, was
really developing the mathematics behind gene signaling. And the idea
here is that genes don't operate independently. And so, we need to
understand how they work together as a collection of things to
understand, you know, the biological function. And then when I went to
Noblis, I started doing genetics a lot for the Department of Defense.
But in the end, someone sat down with me and said, “hey, could you
switch out bits for genes? And what would that do?” And that's really
where we started our cyber practice. And so for many years I did quite a
bit of work in developing algorithms for detecting cyber-intrusion and
threats and those types of things. And this started kind of a unique
opportunity that I had of becoming much more of a generalist. And so,
from that, after cyber is really where I became a chief scientist and I
worked in materials research and looking at different types of
high-temperature materials that can be used for hypersonic aircraft.
I've done work in tissue printing, in infectious disease. I ran a
program in synthetic biology for many years for IARPA, and nuclear work,
I've done flood research work. In the end, kind of one of the things
people ask me is, what ties it together. And underneath it all comes
down to math and modeling, and understanding the technical question that
you're trying to address.

[Holly Hobbs:] Well, you've touched on many portfolios that we do work
on pretty regularly here at GAO, so I can understand why you would have
been selected. So with that said, GAO does a lot of work on emerging
technologies and trends. What do you see as the top technology trends or
issues for the near future?

[Sterling Thomas:] Yeah, so for the near future, there's really two
sides that I think about. Looking at the new emerging science and
technologies that are coming around and then what do they mean for our
society and how does that impact the work that we do? And so I'll give
you two examples that are important ones going on right now. One is, of
course, machine learning. Machine learning is a very fast maturing
technology. And it has a big impact in society because of the types of
things you can do with it. And when you think about machine learning.
And artificial intelligence, of course. It's really important to think
about: these are tools to do things. These are tools to either improve
the process that we have now or make something a little bit easier to
think about. So, you think about the general AI types of tools, like
ChatGPT that can write a letter for you as long as you give it the
parameters of a letter. That's a tool that's designed to do that. That
then brings up the societal part of it, of what if it was someone's job
to write that letter, you know, how's that impact things. And so I look
at emerging technologies and the new things that are coming,
particularly in the short term, is, you know, how is that technology
going to be used by the government and by American citizens? And how do
we need to think about how that technology can impact their lives? In my
lifetime, the internet has shown up, machine learning has shown up.
Really, the way we consume entertainment has changed. The science world
that I live in is changed dramatically. Each one of them requires some
thought about how does that impact society. And the second example I'll
give you comes from synthetic biology. To have the ability to develop,
you know, artificially engineered organisms. And you think these things
are everywhere. They're in our food stuffs, right? We have genetically
modified organisms in our food stuff. We have different technologies we
can develop to change bacteria to produce different products for us.
There is an opportunity there where things can go badly and how do we
develop policies and rules around that technology so that we can use it
in a safe way—just like we do with machine learning and artificial
intelligence—but also use it in a way that's going to help people and
not hurt people. And so those are some of the types of things I think
about. Now, there's a lot of other ones coming up. In fact, that's
another one of my jobs that I mentioned earlier is looking at kind of
the horizon of new technologies that are coming in. You know, even ten
years out so that we can then help Congress know what's potentially
coming and kind of get a head start on the thoughts of how would policy
or investment even be altered to help support these technologies and
make them work best for Americans?

[Holly Hobbs:] Well, and I was going to ask about long-term trends—are
they the same as what we're seeing now or different? 

[Sterling Thomas:] They're different. It comes down to something we call
the hype cycle. And it's funny, I just had a conversation last week with
some colleagues at George Mason University where I also teach about
this. And, you know, the hype cycle is something that happens when you
have a new technology that shows up and has an immediate impact in
people's lives and gets lots of attention. And AI is going through this
right now, but that means there's going to be something else that's
going to be in the hype cycle the next couple of years. And so, we try
to predict what are those things that are coming down the road so that
the Congress and the stakeholders and policymakers have a little bit of
heads up. And so, when a new technology enters into this hype cycle, it
becomes really important for Americans. The people have already thought
through how does this impact Americans lives? What are the types of
investments that the government should make in this? How do we support
the industry to continue to grow and innovate around these areas? And
so, one of our jobs is to constantly keep ahead of that hype cycle so
that our stakeholders, Congress, have the information they need to make
those good decisions.

[Holly Hobbs:] And one of the things that's been in the news a lot and
you've already touched on it a little bit, is artificial intelligence,
right? It's impacting us now. It's going to have larger, broader impacts
in the future. What do you think GAO's role can be in the discussion
about AI?

[Sterling Thomas:] Our role is already happening, so we're already
involved in the discussion about AI and specifically about generative
AI. And so, the types of roles that GAO is involved in this—first, with
our main client, Congress, we talked to them about the policies. They're
thinking about, you know, what types of guardrails do we need to put
into law so that we can not only encourage investment in this space. But
they also want to make sure the guardrails are there so that it's not
going to hurt society. The other side of it is with how the federal
government's going to use AI, right? And so, we already do operate in
many different parts of the federal government that use machine learning
and AI in doing their work. GAO is now looking at, and we put out a
report on kind of the framework of AI, but governance is now becoming
very important to looking at all of the different parts of government
that are investing taxpayer dollars in AI machine learning and saying,
okay, “what are the rules you're following? What datasets are you using
to train this up? What actual function is it serve within your mission?”

{MUSIC}

[Holly Hobbs:] So Sterling just told us that there are a number of
emerging and long-term technology and science trends that will impact
all of us. And that GAO plays an important role in informing Congress
about these trends and their policy options. Sterling, is there any
trend or issue that you're really excited to see play out?

[Sterling Thomas:] Yeah, I mean, we spent a lot of time talking about,
AI. So I'm interested and excited to see how that plays out. But just to
talk about something different. I'm really fascinated by the private
space industry and I'm excited to see where that goes, There's a lot of
opportunity there to obviously bring in private investment in addition
with the government investment. It's been going on for decades. But
really the private industry getting involved in what types of
opportunities does that bring instead of just nations supporting it—What
types of things can we do in space that are better than on Earth? You
know, is it how are they going to move beyond just tourism? And so,
that's a technology and science issue, because there's lots of
potentially improvements, we could do in say manufacturing or other
types of things that are better in low gravity versus high gravity. How
does that change different parts of our industry and science and
research and those types of things when it's being supported by the
private industry? And so, I think that's an opportunity for a
potentially really interesting disruption that then brings in new
innovations and ideas, which gets right at the heart of what I love to
do, which is the science and technology.

[Holly Hobbs:] Last question, what do you want our listeners to know
about GAO's work in science and technology and what's to come?

[Sterling Thomas:] So I think the main message that I put out there is
that GAO really is a science and technology organization. It is
permeated in everything we do, as we look at how the government's
operating are they operating in an efficient and appropriate way.
Science and technology is a big part of that since that's a lot of what
the government does. And I guess the other side of it is that GAO is
looking at these for the purpose of providing just good information to
Congress and the American people. And so, GAO is really focused on
improving Americans lives and doing that by supporting Congress and
making sure the government's being responsible in the way they use
science and technology.

[Holly Hobbs:] That was our new chief scientist, Sterling Thomas. Thanks
for your time. Sterling.

[Sterling Thomas:] You're welcome. Thanks for having me here. I loved
it.

[Holly Hobbs:] And thank you for listening to the Watchdog Report. To
hear more podcasts, subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or
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