Dr. Sudha Upadhyayula

Overview

Dr. Sudha Upadhyayula is a social impact leader, researcher, and strategist whose career bridges the corporate and development sectors. She currently serves as CEO of Sujana Foundation, where she leads strategy, operations, communications; fundraising across the organization’s four pillars — Education, Healthcare, Environmental Resilience, and Livelihoods; Skilling — with a mandate to reach one million lives by 2030. She previously served as COO of OBLF (One Billion Literates Foundation). She holds a PhD in Women’s Studies, with research examining the gendered dimensions of human trafficking and challenging prevailing assumptions about women’s roles within trafficking networks. A committed mentor to youth and an advocate for entrepreneurship as a pathway out of poverty, she brings a distinctive combination of analytical rigor, empathy, and systems thinking to her work. Her current interests sit at the intersection of AI, gender, and social innovation, and she remains a champion of collaborative, purpose-driven models for sustainable community development.