Professional headshot of Gavin Rozzi

Gavin Rozzi, MS, CPM

Director, Data Center Administration

Gavin Rozzi: Government Technology Executive

Building data-driven platforms that turn policy into impact

I build the systems that help New Jersey government serve residents. My team has delivered the NJ Eviction Guide, the HOMES Choice Tool, available to all 564 municipalities for their affordable-housing requirements, a lead-paint inspection portal with GIS mapping, and Operation Right Answer, a contact-center modernization built with the NJ Innovation Authority.

How the work gets done

A mandate from the Legislature does not run itself. Someone has to turn it into a working system, and that is the part I do, along with building the team that keeps it running.

My Execution Framework

Policy Challenge

Complex government mandates requiring technical implementation

Technical Solution

Modern frameworks and data infrastructure built for scale

Measurable Impact

Analytics and performance tracking built into every platform to drive improvement

Why Work With Me

I have done both the policy work and the engineering work, so I can write the systems that implement a statute instead of handing a spec to a vendor. I know what compliance review looks like and what a budget can pay for. I also know that a tenant facing eviction cannot wait for the next release cycle.

2026
NJ Civil Service Commission, delivered by Rutgers SPAA. Capstone: Operation Right Answer, the DHCR contact-center and service-scorecard program.
2025
New Jersey Civil Service Commission
2024-Present
Founding director of the DHCR Data Center. Built the in-house civic technology team that delivered the NJ Eviction Guide, Bringing Veterans Home and the NJ HOMES planning tools.
2020-2022
Founding Data Scientist, Rutgers Urban and Civic Informatics Lab
2017-2024
Built and ran New Jersey's first statewide public records request platform, 2017 to 2024. No longer operates it.

Latest Insights

Recent articles, talks, and contributions

About Gavin Rozzi

Gavin Rozzi is the founding Director of the DHCR Data Center at New Jersey's Department of Community Affairs. He chose to hire and train a civil-service team instead of buying another vendor system. Today, he leads a team he recruited and developed through the civil service system, developers and analysts who bring modern engineering practices to state government. Together, they've delivered platforms like the NJ Eviction Guide, housing compliance tools serving 564 municipalities, and the veteran homelessness tracking systems that helped the state reach Functional Zero in July 2026.

His work combines data science, software engineering and a working knowledge of how policy gets written and carried out. That mix is what lets him take a complex government mandate and turn it into a system residents can use.

His career began in academia, where he was the founding Data Scientist at the Rutgers Urban and Civic Informatics Lab, a research center at the Bloustein School. He built the lab's technical infrastructure and its analytical practice, connecting computational methods to urban policy research. As a Research Affiliate at the New Jersey State Policy Lab, he worked on a spatial analysis of the opioid crisis that used spatial analysis and statistical modeling to inform state policy.

Before joining government, he founded OPRAmachine, New Jersey's first statewide freedom of information platform, which processed over 75,000 public records requests and released 250GB of government data before he stepped down in 2024. He has also published open-source tools used by researchers nationwide, including zipcodeR, an R package on CRAN with 53+ peer-reviewed citations (as of March 2026). Its citations include papers in Nature Communications, Cancer Discovery and MIS Quarterly. In a personal civic capacity, he also is an elected member of the Burlington County Democratic Committee for Florence Township (Ward 3, District 2).

He holds an M.S. in Data Science & Strategic Analytics and a B.A. in Political Science from Stockton University, where he graduated with a 4.0 and 3.9 GPA respectively. He earned the Certified Public Manager (CPM) credential in August 2026. New Jersey's program is administered by the Civil Service Commission and delivered by the Rutgers University School of Public Affairs and Administration. His capstone, Operation Right Answer, is consolidating thirteen siloed phone queues in the State's largest housing division with one purpose-built contact center and a service scorecard for measuring the resident experience. He was part of the A4-S50 implementation team that received the 2025 Governor's Team of Excellence Award, and he took first place in the 3D category of the 2022 NJ DEP GIS Mapmaking Contest.

Leadership Philosophy: The best government technology comes from understanding institutional constraints and working within them. Change tends to arrive incrementally, once a project has earned enough trust to be given the next one, and the capacity it leaves behind matters more than the launch. That means translating policy intent into systems that work, building coalitions across organizational lines, and respecting how government moves. The goal is capacity that keeps working after the project ends.

Learn more about Gavin Rozzi →

Core Expertise

Data Science & Analytics

Measures a manager can act on. The service scorecard from his CPM capstone gives each one an owner, a written definition, and a fixed reporting cadence.

Digital Transformation

Services organized around why residents get in touch rather than around the org chart. Operation Right Answer is consolidating thirteen phone queues into one menu.

Full-Stack Development

Resident-facing tools built in house: the NJ Eviction Guide, the HOMES Choice Tool, and a lead-paint inspection portal, available to all 564 municipalities.

Impact at a Glance

564 NJ municipalities served by the HOMES Choice Tool
2,500+ Veterans housed on the way to Functional Zero
CPM Certified Public Manager, August 2026
122K+ zipcodeR downloads on CRAN
53+ Peer-reviewed citations, as of March 2026
75,000+ OPRA requests processed by OPRAmachine, 2017 to 2024

Get in touch

I'm open to consulting work and speaking invitations, and I'm happy to talk about senior roles in government technology.