Rita is a qualified Civil Engineer with over 25 years’ experience across transport planning, urban planning, business transformation and managing organisational change. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Public Works Engineering Australasia and is the immediate past president of that association. Rita has been invited to be an expert contributor to Connected and Automated Vehicle steering groups across Australia, New Zealand, United States, Singapore and Canada.

In October 2022, following an extensive career covering, local government, consulting and industry associations, including running the Australia and New Zealand Driverless Vehicle Initiative (ADV), from 2016 to 2021, she joined AWS as the industry head for Transport across ANZO. In this role, Rita works with Public Sector Customers, across Land, Sea, Air and Rail Transport. Her role is to support Transport agencies on their transition to the cloud and assisting them to leverage the scale and agility of the cloud, to deliver, safe and sustainable services to their customers.

As the key spokesperson for a number of organisations across her career, Rita has delivered keynote addresses on the topic of driverless vehicles across the globe and has met with all levels of governments and their agencies in Australia, New Zealand, United States and UK. Career highlights include establishing the International ADVI program, running the first on-road demonstration of automated vehicle technology in the Southern Hemisphere in 2015, being the first female President of the Institute of Public Works Engineering, SA and Australasia, as well as having the IPWEA scholarship for Women in asset management named after her.