Brett Bobley

Brett Bobley is an Advisor to the HAVI (Humanities and AI Virtual Institute) program at Schmidt Sciences, where he does grantmaking to support research teams doing work in the digital humanities with a particular focus on artificial intelligence.

Prior to Schmidt Sciences, Brett was the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). In that capacity, he oversaw the agency’s information technology, software development, records management, grant evaluation and data collection, and open science initiatives. During the Biden administration, Brett served on the government-wide Subcommittee on Open Science under the White House’s National Science and Technology Council and developed the NEH’s first open science policy.

In addition to his CIO work, Brett was also the founder and director of the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities (ODH), which funded research that brought together the humanities and advanced computing. In that role, Brett helped to establish the field of digital humanities both domestically and internationally, via many global grantmaking partnerships with international funders.

In 2007 Brett received a Presidential Rank Award from the President of the United States in recognition of his exceptional accomplishments.

Brett holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Chicago and an MS in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. He lives with his wife in Washington, DC.