Peter L Levin

Education and early career

Levin received his B.S., M.S., and doctoral degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He was a DAAD visiting scientist and post-doctoral student at the Institute for High Voltage Engineering at the Technical University of Munich. He started his academic career as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator during the first Bush Administration for his work in electromagnetic and acoustic field theory and high performance computing. In 1994 he spent a sabbatical year as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in the Department of Mathematical Physics at the Technical University of Darmstadt, and in 1995 he was selected to be a White House Fellow. Levin was appointed associate dean for research and graduate programs at Boston University’s College of Engineering in 1997.

Entrepreneurial career

In 1999, Levin joined the international venture capital firm, Techno Venture Management. He was subsequently an executive director of the open source network company Astaro, a board member of the semiconductor design automation company NeoLinear, and a co-founder of the GPS-based cybersecurity company Zanio. In 2003, Levin co-founded DAFCA, INC., a semi-conductor design software company. DAFCA won a NIST Advanced Technology Program Award in 2004.

Levin holds several patents in chip design and GPS-based authentication, and has published over 50 scientific papers and policy articles. His work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Huffington Post, Politico.com, and the White House website. He has co-authored pieces on cybersecurity with Wesley Clark, and with Dan E. Geer Jr.. He also wrote an article with Michèle Flournoy, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, that encourages the Federal Government to embrace practices that protect data and personal identity from the inside out. He recently collaborated with General H. Hugh Shelton and Stephen Ondra in writing a report which urges the Department of Defense to choose an open source electronic health record when reforming the Military Health System.

Public Service

In 1995 he was a White House Fellow in the Office of Management and Budget, and in 2009 Levin joined the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs as Senior Advisor to the Secretary and Chief Technology Officer. He spearheaded the development of the automated Agent Orange claims processing, and the creation of the Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent, and led the design, implementation and deployment of the Blue Button. He stepped down as CTO on March 1, 2013.

Career after public service

Levin now serves as the CEO and co-founder, along with Dmitry Kachaev and Matt McCall, both former Presidential Innovation Fellows, of Amida Technology Solutions.