Maya Ajmera

Maya Ajmera is the president and CEO of Society for Science & the Public and publisher of Science News and its family of media properties.

Ajmera is the founder of The Global Fund for Children, a nonprofit organization that invests philanthropic capital in innovative community-based organizations working with some of the world’s most vulnerable children and youth.

She is the author of the 2016 book Invisible Children: Reimagining International Development at the Grassroots with Gregory A. Fields, published by Palgrave Macmillan. Ajmera is also the author of nearly twenty award-winning children's books, including Children from Australia to Zimbabwe: A Photographic Journey Around the World, Extraordinary Girls, To Be an Artist, Faith, and Healthy Kids.

Raised in eastern North Carolina by Indian immigrants, Ajmera graduated from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham. She holds a bachelor's degree in biology from Bryn Mawr College and a master's degree in public policy from the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.

Ajmera founded The Global Fund for Children in 1994, when she was just 25 years old. The inspiration came from a trip she took to India on a Rotary Fellowship a few years earlier. While waiting for a train she saw a group of children being taught by a teacher on a train platform. Ajmera learned that these children were students in a Train Platform School for impoverished children who could not attend school. Moved by what she saw, Ajmera applied for and won a seed grant from Echoing Green. This initial funding helped her build an organization to support innovative grassroots efforts on behalf of vulnerable children around the world.

During her tenure years with the organization, the Global Fund for Children gave nearly $25 million in capital to nearly 500 grassroots organizations in 75 countries. These grants have served more than seven million children around the world. Ajmera left her position as president in 2011, after eighteen years, and remained on GFC's board of directors until 2013.

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