WASHINGTON: United States President Joe Biden has announced his intention to nominate Dilawar Syed, a Pakistani-American, to serve as Deputy Administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA).
“I’m deeply humbled & honoured by President Biden’s nomination of me to help lead @SBAgov as the Deputy Administrator,” said Syed, ratifying the news on Twitter the following day.
He further added that, “If confirmed by the US Senate, I will put my heart & soul into helping small businesses everywhere in these challenging times.”
Syed is president and chief executive officer (CEO) at Lumiata, an artificial intelligence (AI) for healthcare company, since April 2018, the White House said in a press release on Thursday. At the intersection of clinical knowledge, data science, and machine learning, Lumiata delivers cost and risk insights to health plans and health systems, helping companies drive down costs.
Previously, Syed was president at Freshworks where he is credited with helping scale the software company’s products to thousands of small and medium businesses. He founded the company’s North America business overseeing sales and marketing, customer success, and partnerships, according to his profile on Linkedin.com.
Earlier in his career, Syed oversaw business operations at Yahoo!’s Platform & Infrastructure Division and was a product manager at Siebel Systems.
“Syed has driven civic efforts at the Federal, state, and local level focusing on economic growth and entrepreneurship,” the White House said.
He served on President Barack Obama’s White House Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) and chaired the White House Initiative on AAPIs’ Economic Growth Committee.
He has an MBA. from The Wharton school of the University of Pennsylvania and earned a BA in Economics and Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin.
Syed immigrated to the United States from Pakistan as a freshman student to attend The College of Wooster in Ohio.
In December, President Biden appointed Pakistan-born Ali Zaidi as deputy White House Climate Coordinator.
Zaidi, 33, works under Gina McCarthy, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under former President Barack Obama and now leads a major advocacy group, to coordinate the new administration’s domestic climate agenda.
Biden has given nearly a dozen jobs in his administration to Americans of Indian origin, including Vivek Murthy as the surgeon general.
But he had to withdraw the nomination of Neera Tanden, an Indian-American, for the key position of director of the Office of Management and Budget for lack of support in the Senate which must clear the nominees.
Vice President Kamala Harris, a daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, is the highest-ranking woman in America’s 244-year existence.
