ITS Berkeley is excited to welcome Kristin White as a new ITS Senior Fellow! She joins a distinguished group of professionals who have made extraordinary contributions and excelled in the transportation field, and shown a desire to improve transportation education, research, and practice through collaboration with ITS faculty, staff, and students. White is a dynamic change-agent transforming transportation for the future as Google Public Sector’s Transportation Industry Executive and Head of Transportation Strategy and Partnerships.
“We are very excited to engage with Kristin as an ITS Senior Fellow,” says ITS Berkeley Acting Director Scott Moura. “We have enjoyed working with her and seeing her interact with our students has been an inspiration and guiding light!”
ITS has already enjoyed having White participate in the Haas and ITS Fireside Chat - Powering the Future: Public-Private Partnerships at the Intersection of Mobility, Autonomy, and AI in May 2025, present at the ITS Berkeley seminar series in the Fall of 2025 and serve as a panelist at the DRIVE AI Workshop in October 2025. As a senior fellow, White will continue to incorporate her expertise and insights into ITS Berkeley activities, work with students and faculty in transportation-related classes, projects and activities, and be integral in ITS Berkeley research, grants and proposals.
“I'm beyond humbled and honored to accept the Senior Fellow invitation,” says White. “I'm excited to collaborate with the ITS team and know there is so much great work we can do together.”
Bio:
As Google Public Sector’s Transportation Industry Executive and Head of Transportation Strategy and Partnerships, White is helping to lead a new arm Google and Alphabet created to use tech and innovation to support transportation goals including saving lives, building resilient communities, connecting communities and to keep America moving.
Her leadership philosophy focuses on servant leadership, focusing on people, humility, kindness, innovation, inclusion, authenticity, human centered design, plain language and meaningful engagement to advance performance-based outcomes.
Her accomplishments include being the youngest woman to serve as acting administrator of the FHWA, the nation’s largest surface transportation agency overseeing nearly $300B in investment with 3,000 employees across 52 states and terrifies. She led the nonprofit ITS America dedicated to transformation transportation to technology and launched one of the country’s first state run innovation programs at the Minnesota Department of Transportation as Innovation Director. She started her career as a US Department of State Fulbright Fellow in Japan and practiced law before entering the public sector. She’s responsible for launching the country’s first V2X plan and getting the federal government to develop a national strategy to advance digital infrastructure.
She’s won awards including the Women in Transportation Innovation Award, Secretary’s and Administrator’s awards from USDOT, but the most rewarding to her is putting people first and being an extraordinarily empathetic leader.
She has a J.D. from Hamline University School of Law, a Certificate in Global Arbitration from Queen Mary University of Law, and a B.A. from St. Olaf College.
A dynamic and energetic change agent some describe as human sunshine, her goals are to move fast, break things and do good while working with brilliant teams, promoting people, lifelong learning and always being kind to advance our transportation goals of safety, resiliency, and connecting communities.
She’s originally from the Black Hills of South Dakota. In her down time, she mentors woman and runs a nonprofit to advance women in transportation, and runs, practices yoga, and hikes around her Bay Area home, with her West Highland Terrier, Teddy.