Chantale Wong was nominated to be the US Executive Director to the Asian Development Bank by President Biden and subsequently confirmed by the US Senate in a majority bipartisan vote on February 8, 2022 – making her the first openly lesbian and openly LGBTQ+ person of color Ambassador in US history.
Chantale has had a long and distinguished career in public service, a leader-participant in some of the most significant events in U.S. history. Until August 2016, she was the Senior Vice President at a technology startup firm, Amida Technology Solutions, where she focused on solving data interoperability challenges by developing agile, open source tools. Just prior to that, she was appointed by President Obama to serve as Vice President for Administration and Finance, and Chief Financial Officer at the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). There, she spearheaded the effort to push its multiple data setsintomachine-readable formatsfor accessthrough data.mcc.gov. This garnered for MCC top ranking in the world by Publish What Your Fund, as the most transparent aid agency in 2013.
Chantale also led organization-wide change at MCC in the management of finance, human capital, and information technology. This was a culmination of her reputation for successful transformations of several significant processes across the Federal government earning her the Presidential Award for Management Excellence in 2008. Chantale was also intimately involved in the financial rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and in developing the framework of the financial instruments of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Prior to MCC, she was the budget director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) where she realigned the budget function to the requirements of NASA’s post-space shuttle missions.
Her work in key communities are also noteworthy. Chantale was the founding chair of the Conference on Asian Pacific American Leadership (CAPAL) and is a member of the Advisory Board of Veterans for Global Leadership. In addition, she is a founding member and Treasurer of the Board of Focus on the Story.
Aside from public and community service, visual storytelling is Chantale’s passion, one that she has nurtured the last 5 years, traveling off the beaten paths on several continents to capture visual messages of peoples less seen. The current focus of her photography journey has brought her to photojournalism, documenting events of our communities. She has chronicled the annual Congressional Civil Rights pilgrimages to Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama with Civil Right icon, the late Cong. John Lewis – earning her the role of the official photographer for other civil rights pilgrimages of the Faith and Politics Institute.
Ms. Wong holds a Master in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where she was a Littauer Fellow and a Women’s Leadership Fellow. She has another Master in Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on water and wastewater management. She earned her undergraduate degree in civil and structural engineering from the University of Hawaii.
