Founder and Board Chair

Mala Nayak, MD is a psychiatrist.  She attended medical school in Mumbai, India, and did her residency in psychiatry at Stanford.  She has been working for the last 25 years at Momentum for Health, the largest non-profit provider of mental health services in Santa Clara County.  She is currently on the board of The Christmas Bureau of Palo Alto, and served for 4 years on the board of Gunn Foundation.

In her free time, Mala loves to travel and chronicle her trips, read, listen to audiobooks and paint.

Board Treasurer

Ruta Puranik is a Finance and Strategy leader with 25+ years in the Tech industry.  She has held various strategy, operations, and finance positions at companies like Oracle, Cisco, VMware ServiceNow and most recently at Salesforce. 

Ruta is on the board of two other nonprofits, Midpen Media and Gulabis, that serve the community in different ways.  She is passionate about mentoring underprivileged students through various programs.

Ruta and her husband are residents of Palo Alto, CA and their two sons graduated from USC and UC Berkeley and are working in NYC.

Board Secretary

Ashish Vengsarkar works in tech, specializing in telecom and networking.  Over the last three decades, he has been actively involved in non-profits committed to STEM education via high school science fairs and animal causes via German Shepherd dog rescues. 

Ashish has an MBA from Wharton, a Ph.D. in Fiber Optics from Virginia Tech and a B.Tech. from IIT Bombay. He currently works at Google.

In his free time, Ashish constructs crosswords and enjoys Bollywood and Indian classical music.