Shin-pei Tsay is the Chief Information Officer for the City of Boston and leads the Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT). DoIT plays a critical role in enabling the effective delivery of public services, programs and products for residents, families, businesses, and visitors. It powers the engines for digital transformations, such as permitting transformation and 311 modernization, and enables emerging technologies to be applied to everything from transportation to coastal resiliency and even emergency preparedness. DoIT has overhauled the City’s digital infrastructure and websites, including assessing information online, making it easier for residents to look up property information online and pay taxes and improving Wicked Free Wi-Fi to deliver high quality internet for the public in schools, libraries, police stations, fire stations and other municipal buildings, serving over 130,000 residents; and moving data closer to decision-making and executing on a citywide data strategy. Additionally, DoIT adopted the first citywide generative artificial intelligence policy and was one of the first cities to apply AI to alleviate congestion; Project Green Light in partnership with Google is now in its second phase.

Shin-pei has devoted her career to making cities work better for people at the intersection of public space, transportation, climate, and civic technology. Her past leadership roles include head of global cities and sustainability policy at Uber where she drove the policy initiative behind the company’s global sustainability commitment; founding executive director at the Gehl Institute where she launched the Public Life Data Protocol with San Francisco, Seattle, and Copenhagen; deputy executive director of Transit Center where she established pillars of public transportation reform including transit board capacity building, emerging technologies, and bus network redesign; director of cities and transportation program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where she researched demand-side policies that supported stronger connections between federal transportation and climate policy arenas; and deputy director at Transportation Alternatives where she was a leader in an all-sector movement to accelerate urban transportation innovations from safe pedestrian street designs and bike lane networks to Vision Zero. She was recognized as a Local IT Leader by State Scoop in 2025 and as a Sustainability Star by AdWeek in 2022. 

Tsay holds a Master of Science in Cities, Space & Society from the London School of Economics, a B.A. with Distinction in Government from Cornell University and has served on the New York City Public Design Commission; multiple non-profit organizations, most recently as Vice Chair of SPUR, the Bay-area civic planning institution; and taught urban design at Parsons School of Design and Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. She is currently a member of the Harvard Extension School’s Sustainability Master of Liberal Arts Advisory Board.