Meet Dave

Dave Sulek is a strategy and policy leader with 30 years of experience at Booz Allen. Today, he spearheads the firm’s climate and infrastructure work that is focused on climate change, new energy technologies, and transportation infrastructure transformation. Dave experiments with and designs new policy analytics tools, techniques, and methods that blend traditional public policy and management with advanced analytics and user experience approaches.

Previously, Dave consulted with government agencies responsible for implementing major statutory and policy reforms in healthcare, cybersecurity, homeland security, and internet governance. His expertise includes providing policy leadership for agencies implementing innovative healthcare payment models.

Dave is a member of the Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs Executive Advisory Board and is a senior fellow at Auburn University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security. He has published numerous articles on a wide range of topics including cybersecurity, fraud, emergency preparedness, and internet-based voting.

Dave holds a master’s degree in national security studies from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s degree in political science from Syracuse University.

What excites you most about the climate change mission? Everything! It’s purposeful. It impacts all of us. It’s inherently multidisciplinary. It demands new and novel technologies, business models, and policy frameworks. It requires us to think globally and hyper locally—at the same time.

What do you see as the most important emerging climate mission? There’s an imperative for the government to fully unlock the potential of climate data and to turn it into actionable insights. Climate intelligence extends beyond an individual agency or mission. It requires breaking down silos to liberate the data, thinking more creatively about how to employ computing and analytical technologies to reveal new insights, making those insights more accessible to diverse communities, and investing in enhancing science and “scientific tradecraft.”

What climate or infrastructure issue do you most like to “nerd out” on? Electric and automated vehicles. The car is an icon, deeply rooted in the American psyche. On one level, moving to electrified and automated vehicles will compel the country to fuse together three infrastructures into a seamless new one—electric power, surface transportation, and communications. That’s a huge challenge. But on another level, combining electrification and automation reopens the discussion of how a car is designed, how and when it drives, and other questions. Who knows what a car will even look like 10 years from now?

What government agency most intrigues you around climate change? All of them intrigue me—even those agencies where climate isn’t core to the mission. But I’ll admit I have a special place in my heart for FEMA. It’s the first agency I supported at Booz Allen, and it faces some daunting challenges as its role continues to expand with a focus on issues like climate resiliency and adaptation.

How do your teams inspire you? I'm continually amazed by the generosity of my colleagues at all levels. I think people sometimes perceive consulting as a “shark tank,” with everyone out for themselves. My experiences at Booz Allen have been the opposite. Every time I’ve needed a helping hand, a creative idea, or just a supportive ear during a tough project, my colleagues have been there to lift me up—not knock me down.