Gavin Rozzi: Digital Transformation & Civic Technology Executive

Gavin Rozzi is the inaugural Director of the DHCR Data Center at New Jersey's Department of Community Affairs. When he started in this role, he faced a choice that every government technology leader encounters: build another vendor-dependent system, or invest in people who could grow with the mission. He chose the latter. Today, he leads a team he recruited and developed through the civil service system, developers and analysts who bring modern engineering practices to state government. Together, they've delivered platforms like the NJ Eviction Guide (recently rewritten in Next.js), housing compliance tools serving 564 municipalities, and veteran homelessness tracking systems that helped the state reach Functional Zero in July 2026, with permanent codification now advancing through the Legislature.

His work pulls together data science and analytics, digital transformation, and full-stack web development, and it's grounded in how policy actually gets made and implemented. That mix is what lets him take a complex government mandate and turn it into a system residents can use, rather than another tool that looks good in a demo and stalls in production.

Gavin Rozzi's work at the intersection of data science, public policy, and urban studies began in academia, where he was the founding Data Scientist at the Rutgers Urban and Civic Informatics Lab, a research center reporting to the executive dean. He built the lab's technical infrastructure and its analytical practice, connecting computational methods to urban policy research. As a Research Affiliate at the New Jersey State Policy Lab, he led a study of the opioid crisis that used spatial analysis and statistical modeling to inform state policy.

Before joining government, Gavin Rozzi founded OPRAmachine, New Jersey's first statewide freedom of information platform, which has processed over 75,000 public records requests and released 250GB of government data. He has also published open-source tools used by researchers nationwide, including zipcodeR, an R package available on CRAN with 53+ peer-reviewed citations in journals including Nature, Cancer Discovery, and MIS Quarterly. This combination of research leadership, civic technology innovation, and practical government experience positions Gavin Rozzi uniquely to tackle complex policy challenges through rigorous analytical methods and modern technical solutions. In a personal civic capacity, Gavin Rozzi also serves as an elected member of the Burlington County Democratic Committee for Florence Township (Ward 3, District 2).

Gavin Rozzi holds an M.S. in Data Science & Strategic Analytics and a B.A. in Political Science from Stockton University, where he graduated with a 4.0 and 3.9 GPA respectively. He earned the Certified Public Manager (CPM) credential in August 2026. New Jersey's program is administered by the Civil Service Commission and delivered by the Rutgers University School of Public Affairs and Administration. His capstone, Operation Right Answer, replaced thirteen siloed phone queues in the State's largest housing division with one purpose-built contact center and a service scorecard for measuring the resident experience. Gavin Rozzi's work has been recognized with the Governor's Team of Excellence Award and first place in the NJ DEP GIS Mapping Contest.

Leadership Philosophy: The best government technology comes from understanding institutional constraints rather than fighting them. Change tends to arrive incrementally, once a project has earned enough trust to be given the next one, and the capacity it leaves behind matters more than the launch. That means translating policy intent into systems that work, building coalitions across organizational lines, and respecting how government actually moves. The point is not better technology on its own. It is institutional muscle that keeps working after the project ends.

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