Galia Nurko is passionate about the interdisciplinary intersections that shape society, with a particular interest in how technology and its diffusion is impacting economic, social and political dynamics around the world. Her career reflects that passion. 

At present, Nurko serves as the director of strategy and development for the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA), where she oversees the organizations’ future growth strategy, which includes business development and partnership. In this role, she supports the development of the organization’s long-term strategy, writing of grants and implementation of projects, including Common Good Cyber. The goal of Common Good Cyber is to fundamentally change how cybersecurity is addressed, moving society from a “law-of-the-strongest” approach to a collective approach that reduces cybersecurity risk for everyone. 

Nurko’s experience at GCA builds on her success at DAI Global LLC’s Center for Digital Acceleration (CDA). CDA’s mission is to support international development donors to sustainably integrate digital solutions, as appropriate, into their programming. When Nurko joined the team, the portfolio exclusively focused on the net-positives of digital adoption, which she saw as a shortcoming. Over the span of 18 months, she proactively built the company’s digital risk portfolio by conducting extensive technical research on critical infrastructure cybersecurity and establishing strategic partnerships around the world, ultimately securing USAID’s first and second major cybersecurity contracts and co-authoring USAID’s Cybersecurity Primer. 

Given that at the time the conversation about digital risk mitigation was quite nascent within the international development community, Nurko recognized that stakeholder mobilization was also needed. To facilitate this, she launched two communities. The first focused on discussing how cybersecurity and other digital risks are affecting DAI’s programming, and the second focused on bringing together experts, implementing partners, private sector, USAID and other donors, and civil society to discuss what steps the international development community could take to effectively embed cybersecurity across all development programming. Change is slow, but she is proud to say the latter community is still informally active. 

In addition to this work, Nurko also designed and applied a research methodology to gather and analyze qualitative data on the interplay of digital access and perceptions of trust and privacy amongst urban youth in Ghana and India. The research findings, expanded upon in a published research paper, illuminated that perceptions of offline risk inform online behavior and are not uniform around the world. 

Prior to DAI, Nurko obtained an MS in foreign service at Georgetown University where she focused on the impact of emerging technologies in developing economies, ranging from issues of digital financial inclusion to the gig economy. Simultaneous to her studies, she worked as a Graduate Policy Fellow with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, where she researched and authored a report on the speed, mobile friendliness, accessibility and security of federal government websites. In addition, Nurko conducted research at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), where she contributed to a variety of projects, including developing proposals for the use of emerging technologies, like blockchain, to improve the delivery of social services. 

Preceding this, Nurko served as director of media relations for the Embassy of Israel to the United States. In this role, she liaised with the communications offices of all three branches of U.S. government and managed all media requests for the ambassador and visiting Israeli dignitaries, including the prime minister and president. 

Nurko is a mother of two and now lives in Ohio. She is a 2024-2025 Richard W. Pogue Fellow for the Cleveland Council of World Affairs and has served on the Joseph and Florence Mandel Jewish Day School Board of Directors for four years. Nurko holds an MS from Georgetown and a BA in history from Ohio State. She speaks English, Spanish and Hebrew.