Soheil Katal

CIO & VP of Technology Services
Forest Lawn

Driving the digital modernization of legacy enterprise architecture into artificial intelligence ecosystems, Soheil Katal is the CIO and vice president of technology services at Forest Lawn. Leveraging this record of success, he previously directed the nation’s second-largest public educational technology sector as the chief information officer for the Los Angeles Unified School District. This expertise extends to large-scale cyber defense infrastructure, where Katal secured a federal pilot grant to engineer a round-the-clock Security Operations Center alongside Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. This leadership trajectory supports his statewide policy contributions through an active AI advisory council seat for the California School Boards Association. He sustains this momentum by spearheading localized municipal partnerships that expand technology accessibility and educational resource solutions for regional youth experiencing severe housing instability. Katal’s historic operational response during emergency campus closures successfully managed the immediate technical distribution of over 200,000 devices to students and delivered connectivity solutions to over 200,000 households in need.