Controller at City of LA

Ron Galperin is the independently elected Controller of the City of Los Angeles. He serves as the watchdog for taxpayers at City Hall, making sure public dollars are spent efficiently and effectively. Galperin oversees a team that audits municipal departments and programs, manages payroll and spending, reports on the City’s finances, pursues fraud and waste, and works to create a more transparent, accountable, equitable and modern government for everyone. Galperin launched ControlPanel LA, the City’s first open data portal, in 2013. During the pandemic, he created the L.A. Equity Index to help address local barriers to opportunity and released a series of resource maps and financial dashboards to aid businesses and residents. Read more about him here.

Acting Chief Information Officer, Los Angeles County

Peter Loo is the Acting Chief Information Officer of Los Angeles County. With over 35 years of public sector IT experience, he serves as the principal adviser to the CEO and provides strategy, leadership and guidance on enterprise IT initiatives, IT Governance and the delivery of information technology capabilities to support the County mission and Board priorities. Prior to joining the Los Angeles County, Mr. Loo was Director of Consulting Services at a large multi-national firm, where he was responsible for the successful delivery of multiple public-sector ERP and public health projects at State and local governments.

Chief Information Officer at Los Angeles Unified School District

Soheil Katal is an enterprising, innovative, solution-focused IT leader, experienced in enterprise architecture management and a proven successful project leader. Twenty years of experience in both the public and private sectors and well-rounded expertise in business insight and technology innovation catapulted him forward to serve as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the nation’s second largest school district. As CIO, Soheil oversees one of the largest technology environments in the nation, with over 500,000 student and employee devices accessing a network of nearly 100,000 access points daily, 30,000 miles of cabling, and 16 petabytes of storage, 1,000 times the size of the Library of Congress. Soheil holds a Master of Business Administration degree in Information Technology from the Florida Institute of Technology and multiple technical industry certifications. He is a member of Phi Kappa Phi.

Chief Product Officer at Fastly

Lakshmi Sharma has decades of experience driving strategy and transformation in engineering, business, and IT, leveraging people, process and technologies for successful business and cultural outcomes. She is currently the Chief Product and Chief Strategy Officer at Fastly, A Global Programmable Edge cloud platform designed to help Enterprises and developers extend their core cloud infrastructure, closer to users. Before Fastly, she was the Director of Product Management for Networking in Google Cloud, where she was responsible for end-to-end customer experience for Networking and Networking Solutions, crossing multiple industry verticals. She also led Products and Engineering at Cisco, Brocade, RIFT.io, Apcera, and Target. Lakshmi is passionate about building inclusive and transparent organizational cultures where everyone feels supported in their growth and empowered to make an impact in the organization. In personal life she believes education is the best way to bring equality. She spends time supporting and growing communities by creating opportunities that were not available to them because of access to equal education and resources to grow.

Chief Data Officer at City of Los Angeles

Eva Pereira is the Chief Data Officer, for the City of Los Angeles. Her team leads the delivery of a wide range of data projects around topics like racial equity in programs and services, census outreach, COVID response, and more. In addition to this, she manages the open data portal, as well as community and academic engagement programs that leverage the City’s open data.