Tiffany Lightbourn
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
2016 fellow
Dr. Lightbourn is the Chief of Research & Evaluation in the Office of Policy and Strategy at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. USCIS is the world’s largest immigration benefit granting agency. Dr. Lightbourn leads a diverse staff of government and contract employees providing research, evaluation, and data analytics to the agency’s senior leadership. She plans and executes the research budget of the agency, fosters relationships with agency internal and external stakeholders, provides technical assistance to Directorates on performance measurement and strategic planning, and implements complex assessments of administrative data and programs. Her work helps increase understanding of immigrant populations, enhance the efficiency of USCIS operations, and bolster the effectiveness of USCIS outreach to the general public. Under her leadership, she has expanded and created a robust staff that won a Directors Award for Excellence and whose studies have won several awards for assessing customer satisfaction.
Prior to joining USCIS, as Deputy Director of the Presidential Transition Team, Dr. Lightbourn led the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) efforts to transition leadership after the upcoming Presidential election. She supervised all aspects of the DHS transition effort including development of a career succession plan, an incident management training plan, a precise onboarding and exiting system, extensive briefing books, and coordination of confirmation preparations for incoming senior leaders. DHS’s transition efforts were widely recognized as being one of the most extensive and comprehensive in the federal government.
