Anita Vanek (Fed)

Anita Vanek is the Deputy Associate Director for Management Resources for the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In this capacity, she is responsible for directly managing four MR Offices: Business Operations, Emergency Services, Information Services, and Fabrication Technology and supporting the Associate Director for Management Resources in leading all NIST-wide institutional support and administrative offices and their functions, including: workforce management, information technology and services, safety and environmental management, facilities maintenance and construction, accounting and finance, acquisitions and grants management, budget formulation, strategic planning and emergency response.

Prior to this role, Anita served as a Senior Advisor to the ADMR and the Director of the NIST Business Operations Office (BOO). In these roles she has managed many of NIST’s COVID-19 planning and response efforts. Most notably, she envisioned and established BOO and championed ongoing efforts to modernize service delivery across Management Resources, reducing time-to-delivery of critical services by as much as 40 percent. Her achievements in this area have been recognized inside and outside of NIST and have earned her numerous awards, including the 2020 NIST Director’s Award for Administrative Excellence.

Anita also served as the Process Improvement and Project Management Lead in the NIST Office of Information and Systems Management (OISM) where she was responsible for managing OISM’s open data efforts and the OU’s overall project management and process improvement portfolios. 

Prior to joining NIST, Anita was a project management consultant for the Department of Energy and worked as a process engineer for an international building products manufacturer. Anita has a master’s degree in Public Leadership and Organizational Improvement from George Washington University and a BS in Chemical Engineering from Bucknell University.