Will Yang, MBA, has a background in innovation and design strategy and in public health and human services. He is a Program Director and Design Lead in the Design Lab of the Veterans Experience Office in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. In this role, he focuses on helping the department achieve veterans’ trust and delight in their VA health and benefits programs by designing and implementing enterprise-level initiatives toward improving culture, policy, services, and systems.

Mr Yang previously served as the Executive Director of the NYC Children’s Cabinet under the NYC Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, where he developed collaborative initiatives between city agencies focused on solving systemic inequities by helping agency leaders integrate policies and services. An example of an initiative includes the cabinet amending counterproductive legacy policy set by a city welfare agency that had been decreasing historically underserved families’ access to public preschool.

Prior to his stint in city government, he worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as a director of innovation programs under the HHS chief technology officer. He developed, launched, and managed government-leading innovation programs including the HHS Ignite Accelerator and the HHS Data Science CoLab.