Kamal Nigam

Executive Director, The Hear Foundation

Kamal brings his leadership experience in building collaboration to his work alongside The Hear Foundation’s board of directors. The grandson of a police officer, he is active in Pittsburgh’s nonprofit community, currently serving as Chairman of Riverlife, Secretary of The Pittsburgh Foundation, and a member of the Board of Visitors for the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information.   

Previously, Kamal was the co-founder and site lead for Google’s 750-person Pittsburgh office. As a Senior Engineering Director at Google, he led the teams that built Google’s shopping experience and created the underlying metadata with machine learning and large-scale human operations. He was previously adjunct faculty in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Kamal holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  

He has been recognized locally as one of Pittsburgh Magazine’s “40 under 40” and is a proud alumnus of Leadership Pittsburgh class XXXVII.