Chaula Gupta

As vice president and chief program officer, Chaula oversees Digital Promise’s national program team and an expanding international portfolio in partnership with leading international education and education technology organizations. Her team oversees Digital Promise’s educator networks including its signature League of Innovative Schools, the Ciena Solutions Challenge, and the Global Cities Education Network. Ms. Gupta also oversees the Learner Variability Project, global initiatives, research-practice-industry partnerships, and professional services.

Prior to Digital Promise, Ms. Gupta served as vice president of The Chicago Public Education Fund, where she helped drive the organization’s strategic programming and initiatives and directly oversaw its external engagement, operations, and talent management work. Under her leadership, the Fund scaled its programs from serving twenty principals to nearly 300 over five years. In this role, she co-chaired a citywide education funders group focused on principal quality and helped launch The Chicago Principal Partnership. Ms. Gupta also launched the organization’s first endowment fund and ran successful campaigns to raise several millions in funding for programs supporting public schools in Chicago.

Ms. Gupta brings two decades of experience in public education and social innovation. She began her career at Ashoka Innovators for the Public, where she helped select social entrepreneurs for Ashoka’s global fellowship. She founded Teach For America’s Social Entrepreneurship & Innovation Initiative, which coached alumni entrepreneurs to push the boundaries for changing the country through innovative solutions to education challenges. Ms. Gupta built partnerships with incubators and seed investors across the country and helped alumni entrepreneurs raise more than $10 million collectively to launch new education ventures. Under her leadership, Teach For America launched an annual Social Innovation Award with a focus on early-stage entrepreneurs of color and created a virtual design-thinking training program.

Ms. Gupta serves on the board of several nonprofits including GirlTrek, LEAP Innovations, and The Living Record. She was selected to the 2020 class of the Leadership Greater Chicago Fellowship and to the 2017 class of Allstate Foundation’s Greater Good Fellowship for nonprofit leaders. She graduated from Mumbai University with a bachelor’s degree in telecommunications engineering and received a master’s degree in international relations from Syracuse University.