Deputy CIO Charland Retires
Stacy Charland, deputy director of the NIH Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), Office of the Director, and NIH deputy chief information officer, retired at the end of May.
She started her career at NIH in 1994 at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, where she was selected for a 2-year appointment as a database expert. Charland was later hired as the NIGMS CIO and chief of the Information Resources Management Branch in 2001. In 2008, when an organizational change created the NIH Office of the CIO, she became chief of its IT policy and review office and acting NIH deputy CIO. She officially transferred to the deputy CIO position in 2016.
Throughout her career at NIH, Charland has been involved in activities that have helped enhance NIH’s information technology. At NIGMS, she introduced the institute’s first client/server application for grant status reporting. She helped move NIGMS away from reliance on the NIH mainframe system.
As CIO of NIGMS, Charland worked on several high-profile task forces focusing on NIH-wide IT priorities. These efforts included assisting CIT in 2006 to test telework approaches for a potential flu pandemic and working with the Office of the Deputy CIO to plan the deployment of the NIH Project Management Center of Excellence (now called the NIH Project Management Community).
As NIH deputy CIO, Charland helped establish the new OCIO, which supports NIH-wide IT security, policy, enterprise architecture, governance and budget processes. She is well known for her work in a broad range of groups and committees, including the IT management committee, the administrative data council, the IT budget advisory committee, the enterprise systems working group, the Section 508 advisory council and the project management community.
Charland is also recognized for her contributions to NIH accessibility efforts, becoming the NIH Section 508 coordinator in 2008 and establishing an NIH advisory group composed of IC 508 coordinators.
Since February 2019, Charland has been heavily involved in leading NIH’s efforts for the Government Accountability Office (GAO) IT security audit. This included oversight of the process to respond to GAO’s requests for more than 1,000 security-related documents and artifacts and the NIH submission of over 3,000 items to the GAO audit team.
Most recently, Charland has been instrumental in coordinating and promoting the use of NIH enterprise IT contracts to minimize the cost of acquiring “commodity” information technology, such as mobile devices and laptop computers. She is leaving NIH after the recent successful award of an NIH mobile devices and services contract to consolidate 43 wireless contracts and save NIH millions of dollars each year.
Charland will be joining her husband in retirement on their 11-acre farm in Frederick, where she will pursue her passions for horse training and gardening.—Robert Waxman