Gertrud Ingestad was born in Sweden in 1958. She did her studies in languages and history and worked as a language teacher in Stockholm before joining the European Commission in 1995.

Her main domain in the Commission has been resources, with a specialisation on people-and organisation-related issues, in DGT and DG CONNECT, where she also started working with IT from a digitalisation perspective. In January 2014 she joined DG DIGIT as Director for Information Systems and Interoperability Solutions, now Digital Business Solutions. Since 16 April 2016 she is Director-General of the Directorate-General for Informatics.

Her main driving force is constant improvement in collaboration.