Natalie Braswell ’00 (CLAS) ’02 MPA ’07 JD likes to meet every opportunity with an open mind, a guiding principle of her professional life that helps explain how she became Connecticut’s comptroller.

The job is one she never contemplated holding, even after 10 years as general counsel in the Office of the Comptroller. But when health issues forced Comptroller Kevin Lembo to step down with a year of his term remaining, Braswell answered Gov. Ned Lamont’s call to head the agency and finish out the term. She was sworn in on Dec. 31, becoming the state’s first Black comptroller.

“Anyone can do anything for a year,” she says with a laugh. But not just anyone can step into the role as readily as Braswell has. She had left the comptroller’s office less than a year earlier for a position with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. On returning to her previous agency, she knows the staff, the issues and the ropes.

“There’s no learning curve for me. I’d been in the office for 10 years. There are no issues or things that, over the 10 years, I haven’t been directly involved in,” she says. “It’s like stepping back into the same role, but this time instead of advising my boss on decisions, I’m the one being advised and making the decisions.”

The most significant adjustment, she says, has been the demand for media appearances and interviews. “I’m not a very limelight type of person.”

Braswell worked her way through UConn with a BA in political science in 2000, an MPA in public administration in 2002, and a JD in 2007. She has since taught legal practice as an adjunct professor at UConn Law and served on the school’s foundation board and its Diversity, Equity and Belonging Committee.

“UConn Law is extremely proud of Natalie on her historic appointment as comptroller,” Dean Eboni S. Nelson says. “As recognized by her inclusion in the law school’s Gallery of Pioneers, Natalie has been blazing trails for quite some time. She is an outstanding, committed public servant, and we wish her continued success in her new role.”

During law school, Braswell enrolled in the Criminal Clinic and the Asylum and Human Rights Clinic, experiences that reinforced her resolve to pursue public service and taught her important practical skills.

Over time, she says, her memories of the papers she wrote and competitions she entered in law school have faded. “But I could tell you about the 12-year-old boy that my classmate and I worked to get asylum for because he was an undocumented immigrant with the rest of his family and had escaped gang violence in Guatemala.”

Graduating from the School of Law with a strong inclination toward public service, Braswell nevertheless ended up taking a job as an associate in private practice with Updike, Kelly & Spellacy.

“You know what they always say about best-laid plans,” she says. After three and half years with the firm, she was recruited into the job of general counsel in the Office of the Comptroller, and she has been in public service ever since. Yet those years in private practice were extremely valuable, she says.

“Law firms are probably the best places for lawyers, especially new lawyers, to get trained, to learn what it means, professionally, to be a lawyer,” she says. “So I’m actually very grateful for the time that I spent in private practice.”

Being open to unexpected opportunities also brought Braswell to the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, where she became chief of legal, planning and regulatory affairs in February 2021. Part of the job involved working on environmental justice issues such as equal access to environmental resources and the exposure of communities of color to inequitable levels of pollution.

There were plenty of new things to learn in that job, but there were also challenges in the comptroller’s office, even after a decade in the general counsel position, Braswell says. The key was to never hesitate to ask questions, she says, to call people and say, “Hey, I don’t know this thing.”

That principle was never more important than when the first wave of the pandemic  hit in 2020 and the comptroller’s office had to draw up a dozen contracts with private vendors for mass COVID-19 testing sites. Everything was unprecedented. Few providers could handle the complex tests and there was no history on pricing. Turnaround times for results were crucial, and the testing had to happen outdoors.

It was a huge undertaking, yet it was just a small part of the state’s massive COVID-19 response, Braswell says.

“There was not one state agency that was not involved in this effort,” she says.

The pandemic is still very much a part of the picture as Braswell takes the reins at the comptroller’s office. The office is administering the new Connecticut Essential Worker COVID-19 Relief Fund, offering financial assistance to eligible frontline workers who contracted COVID and the families of those who died.

She will also need to steer the agency through a wave of state employee retirements expected this year as a response to changes in the retirement benefits. The office oversees the state’s retirement and health insurance programs.

In addition, Braswell is chair of the Connecticut Retirement Security Authority, which is providing a retirement savings account program for the 600,000 private-sector employees in Connecticut without access to one. She was an advocate for the program from its inception.

“It’s near and dear to my heart to get this program up and running before I exit,” she says.

That exit will come in January 2023, when a new comptroller is sworn in. Braswell is certain that running for office is an opportunity she will pass up. She is not a politician.

So what next?

“I have no idea. I really don’t,” she says. “Something will come up.”