Alia is an experienced social entrepreneur with over fifteen years of experience working with children who’ve endured trauma, sexual abuse, and exploitation. She founded Emerge at the age of 19 after a tsunami relief trip to Sri Lanka and has remained deeply involved ever since. She is also the Co-Founder of Freedom Forward (www.Freedom-Forward.org), a non-profit that is working to prevent the commercial sexual exploitation of youth in San Francisco through systems change. Alia has experience as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company and has served on several boards including the MIT Corporation (MIT’s board of trustees), SERES Global, and Emerge Lanka Foundation. She holds a B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.