Pragyansmita Nayak is a Technical and Data Architect in the Momentum Product Development Group at CGI Federal Inc. She has been employed at CGI since 2004. Momentum is a US federal financial accounting-based suite of products. She has led teams of developers and analysts and managed various technical leadership tasks at federal agencies such as DOI, GSA, FCC, EPA, VA, NRC, USAID, and USIP among others. She develops new courses and teaches training programs at CGI primarily involving technical architecture, code frameworks, and databases. Prior to CGI, she worked with Novell India Development Center, Wipro Global R&D, and IIT Madras ERNET Point of Presence (PoP) as a software developer.

She holds a PhD in Computational Sciences and Informatics (GMU Fairfax, VA) and a BS in Computer Science (BITS Pilani, India). Her thesis focused on the application of machine learning techniques for the estimation of the photomorphic redshift of the galaxies. The study used Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data on which generalized linear model and Bayesian network algorithms were applied. She is a StartingBloc Social Innovation Fellow, Class of DC16. She is actively involved in activities of local meetups and organizations such as ACT-IAC, IEEE, ACM, and CGI Federal Women's Forum. She has been a reviewer with ACM Computing Reviews since 2002. She has presented her work as part of the BayesiaLab User Conference, Smart Data Online 2016, PyData DC 2016, and Splunk GovSummit 2016.

She is an avid hackathon participant--locally and internationally. She has worked on innovative solutions for the ICRC as part of the ThePort2016 Humanitarian and Social Cause hackathon at CERN, Geneva. Additionally, she has worked on a fair pay-enabling solution for HackThePayGap using MIDAAS APIs conducted by the Dept. of Commerce, White House, the Presidential Innovation Fellows, and Office of the DC Govt CTO; a juvenile justice reform application for AngelHack DC; an education pipeline improvement application for Women in Tech DC; and many other similar challenging problems requiring effective disruptive solutions. She recently won the AngelHack DC HPE Haven OnDemand (HOD) challenge. She also won the best graduate poster prize at the Mid-Atlantic Sigma Xi competition.

Software design and development, data science, and learning new technologies and programming languages are her passion. She is currently learning advanced concepts to further expand her knowledge of big data architectures, design thinking, deep learning, augmented/virtual reality, and quantum computing.

She was born and raised in the eastern coastal state of Odisha, India. She lives with her husband in Washington, DC. She loves to cook, color, knit and embroider in her spare time. She volunteers for the Loudoun County Election Board, Odyssey of the Mind, and Cookies for Childhood Cancer.

For more information on Pragyan's professional experience, please visit her LinkedIn profile and her Twitter profile.