Meet the Joint Venture Team

Margaret O'Mara

Distinguished Fellow at Joint Venture’s Institute for Regional Studies

Margaret O'Mara Ph.D., is the Howard & Frances Keller Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. She writes and teaches about the growth of the high-tech economy, the history of U.S. politics, and the connections between the two.

O’Mara is the author of Cities of Knowledge (Princeton, 2005), Pivotal Tuesdays (Penn Press, 2015), and The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (Penguin Press, 2019). In addition to her opinion pieces in The New York Times, her writing also has appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and Bloomberg Businessweek.

At the University of Washington, O’Mara teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in U.S. political and economic history, urban and metropolitan history, and the history of technology. She received her MA/PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from Northwestern University. Prior to her academic career, she worked in the Clinton White House and served as a contributing researcher at the Brookings Institution. O’Mara earned a doctorate in history from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s in English from Northwestern University.

O’Mara was named Distinguished Fellow to Joint Venture’s Institute for Regional Studies, the research arm of the organization, in September 2019.