City of Los Angeles Hires Eva Pereira as Chief Data Officer

(USA and Canada) Eva Pereira has been appointed as the new Chief Data Officer (CDO) for the City of Los Angeles. She will oversee the city's open data program, which makes over 1,500 datasets available to researchers and data scientists, and the Data Angels program, which matches volunteer data scientists with city-wide analytics projects.

Previously, Pereira has worked in data roles at Teach for America and the Knight Foundation. She has a Master's degree from Columbia SIPA and worked on Open Data initiatives at the White House during her graduate studies.

Pereira told Cities Today that an earlier role in the newsroom at Forbes helped her “develop an idea for a good data story” and she then went on to study a master’s degree in urban and social policy at Columbia University.

“That’s where I really started to learn about how data can be leveraged to improve policy programmes and services,” Pereira said. During this time she had the opportunity to work on open data initiatives for President Obama’s White House team.

“That directly prepared me for the work that I’m doing today,” Pereira said. “And through all of those experiences I learned how to understand public sector challenges and how to leverage data to address those challenges.”