Mark Rosekind, a former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, will be the first CEO of the California Mobility Center in Sacramento.
The center opened 18 months ago, backed by local groups to grow a clean-mobility industry in Sacramento and provide job opportunities in future transportation technology for Sacramento residents.
“The accomplishments the CMC has achieved in a very short time are remarkable,” said Rosekind, in a news release. “In only a year and a half and during a pandemic, the CMC created a portfolio of people, projects and networks that position it for tremendous future success. We will build on that momentum, while evolving and expanding the CMC’s enormous potential to effect change in the complex and challenging arenas of transportation safety, sustainability and equity.”
The announcement of Rosekind as CEO came a day after the Sacramento City Council agreed to fund part of the development of a larger $125 million CMC facility near California State University Sacramento. The CMC is currently in a 25,000-square-foot industrial and prototyping space in the Depot Park business park.
“The CMC represents a tremendous opportunity to enhance societal safety, sustainability and equity through new mobility innovations," Rosekind said. “These are big, bold opportunities that can leverage California’s innovation, technology, expertise and resources for meaningful national and global impact.”
In other developments at the CMC, Neal Best, the senior partner at the center, has been appointed to chief operating officer.
Best will replace Mark Rawson, the chief operating officer of the CMC since 2018. Rawson is moving on to be a senior vice president of strategy for GridCure, a Boulder, Colorado-based company that works in analytics in the energy industry.
Rosekind led the NHTSA from 2014 through 2016. He was appointed by then-President Barack Obama. Rosekind was a member of the National Transportation Safety Board from 2010 to 2014. He has also worked at NASA in safety.
Most recently, Rosekind has served as chief safety innovation officer since 2017 at Zoox Inc., a Foster City-based autonomous vehicle subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN).
Rosekind earned an undergraduate degree at Stanford University and a doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Yale University. He completed two years of postdoctoral work at Brown University's medical school.
