• Royce Fellowship
Zachary
Townsend

Concentration 

Applied Math-Economics and Public Policy

Award Year 

2006
Towards a History of Activism at Brown

Faculty Sponsor: William Simmons

Using primary and secondary source material, Zac chronicled and characterized the evolution of student activism at Brown since 1960. His project culminated in a website that narrated student-initiated activism at Brown.

Zac currently lives in San Francisco, CA. He is currently the Chief Data Officer of the State of California, a Member of the Board of Governors of San Francisco Symphony, a member of the Board of Directors of Alternative Family Services, and a member the Board of Directors of Bayes Impact. He was the director of Silicon Valley Bank. At SVB he leads all of the direct channels and manages a team of product owners around the ways that clients can interact with the bank programmatically (e.g. API Banking, OFX, web services, flat-files, transact gateway, etc). Previously, Zac worked at Stripe, a company that makes it easy for software developers to accept credit cards on the web. Before Stripe, he was Senior Technology Policy Adviser to Newark, NJ Mayor Cory Booker, and conducted civic and social sector management consulting as an Associate and Senior Associate at Bennett Midland LLC. He is a published statistician and a co-founder of DataKind, a not-for-profit that matches pro bono data scientists with other not-for-profits. After leaving Brown Zac received an MPA from NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service, where he focused on public financial and statistical methods.