Bruce Yo-Sheng Lai

Bruce Y. Lai serves as Executive Director of School Technology Strategy and Chief of Staff to the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the New York City Department of Education (DOE).  The NYC DOE is the largest public school district in the United States, serving more than 1.1 million students, 1600 schools, and 800,000 parents.

At the NYC DOE Mr. Lai leads major education technology programs, the development and implementation of new technology products and services, and key strategic technology efforts.

• Mr. Lai leads the $28 million NYC Connected Learning program, one of the largest programs nationally to expand learning into the homes of low-income students through technology.  This program is primarily funded by a $22 million federal broadband stimulus grant, one of only two $20+ million awards awarded in the first round of funding.  He also led the development and writing of this winning proposal. Mr. Lai also co-leads the fundraising and development for an $8.5 million program to increase the graduation rates of potential high school dropouts throughout NYC via access to technology and comprehensive digital literacy education.
• Mr. Lai oversees the development and implementation of a free email solution for all students and parents in the NYC public school systems, which will enable safe, secure and private on-line communications among students, teachers, principals and parents.  One of his key successes was the pilot of the One Laptop Per Child project into the NYC classrooms, which represented the first notebook deployment in the NYC public school system and is now the fastest growing computing device in schools today.
• Mr. Lai also leads key strategic technology efforts, which include an internal strategy group around leveraging market-leading cloud productivity suites (e.g., Google Apps or Microsoft Live) for all DOE employees and/or all students.  He also directs the social networking and media policy group that guides schools on the use of tools such as Facebook, YouTube and MySpace.  Finally, he co-manages a lobbying campaign with a coalition of Fortune 500 technology companies including Apple, Intel, Dell, Cisco, Microsoft and HP to provide schools with the funding flexibility ($200+ million) to expand computer access to all students.

Mr. Lai volunteers his expertise to two nonprofit boards.  Currently, he is the First Vice Chairman of the board of the Public Health Foundation Enterprises, a national public health organization based in Los Angeles.  He also serves on the board of the Insight Center on Community Economic Development, a national research, consulting, and legal organization dedicated to building economic health in disenfranchised communities, based in Oakland, CA.

Formerly, Mr. Lai was Chief of Staff to Council Member Gale A. Brewer, the Chair of the Committee on Technology in Government at the New York City Council. Prior to that, Mr. Lai was the Legislative Policy Analyst and lead staff person for the Council Member Brewer’s Committee on Technology in Government.  He has worked in various other capacities for the City of New York since 1999.

Mr. Lai graduated from Williams College and holds a master's degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

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