Zia Khan

As Senior Vice President for Innovation at the Rockefeller Foundation, Zia oversees the foundation’s approach to developing solutions that can have transformative impact on people’s lives. He partners with various initiative teams to incorporate innovation into their strategies. He also leads programmatic work to develop new tools, fields, and movements to improve the social impact of innovations, particularly those related to data and technology. He advises a number of partners and grantees on strategy and leadership. His prior roles at the Foundation included leading strategy, the program portfolio, and monitoring and evaluation.

Prior to joining the Foundation, Zia was a management consultant advising leaders in technology, mobility, and private equity sectors. He spent most of his career at Katzenbach Partners where he founded the San Francisco office and led the West Coast practice. He worked with Jon Katzenbach on research related to leadership, strategy, and organizational performance, leading to their book Leading Outside the Line.

Zia has served on the World Economic Forum Advisory Council for Social Innovation and the U.S. National Advisory Board for Impact Investing. He is also on the Board of Directors for Atlas AI and chairs the Board for DataKind. Zia holds a B.S. from Cornell University and M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.