Surya oversees data and technology at The Legal Aid Society, including strategy, planning, advocacy, support, training and staffing across application development and data, infrastructure and user experience teams. Across our practices, the role of technology and data is ever more critical to support our social workers, paralegals, attorneys, investigators and most importantly, to better serve the vulnerable individuals, families and children we work for.

Before joining The Legal Aid Society, Surya worked with The World Bank, helping its grantees build digital capacity on projects addressing poverty, refugee rights, and reproductive health. He has led professional services teams and in-house technology and data practices at domestic and international nonprofits, including leading information services at The Asia Foundation, across 18 countries in developing Asia. Before moving into the nonprofit sector he was founder and CTO of a security software startup. After graduating from the dot com space, he worked to design grassroots technology for low-resource settings. One example is a store-and-forward wireless mesh network that employed a mule later upgraded to a Vespa, solar power and wireless tablets to enable communications and medical diagnostics at a community health center in rural Costa Rica.

Surya is a change leader with deep experience in digital innovation and operational integration. He is recognized as a pioneer for his work at the intersection of governance, data, and access to justice in international development. In 2014 he won the InsideNGO Operational Excellence award. Surya has a B.A. from Whitman College and a J.D. from New York University. He holds MCSD, CISSP & PMD-Pro certifications, and serves on the board of CIO4Good.