Dr. Alberto Ayala has 30 years of professional experience, having spent the last two decades as a technocrat directing air quality management, conducting policy-relevant research, and being involved in the development of some of California's most widely recognized air quality and climate change policies. He is a mechanical engineer with BS, MS, and PhD degrees from the University of California, Davis and author/co-author of more than 160 refereed publications and reports, including several regulatory statements of reasons supporting California’s leading clean and zero emission vehicle regulations. 

Ayala is Executive Director and Air Pollution Control Officer of the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District and former Deputy Executive Officer of the California Air Resources Board. He served on the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering faculty at West Virginia University, where he still holds an adjunct faculty appointment. His private sector experience includes work as a Design Engineer for Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical and internships with General Electric’s Corporate Research Center, the California Energy Commission, and the UC Davis’s Atmospheric Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory.

Ayala is a contributing author to the book "Ambient Combustion Ultrafine Particles and Health" and author of the upcoming book “3 Forks in the Road. Dieselgate: the Volkswagen cheating scandal.”  Due to his role bringing VW to justice, he appears in Germany’s recent Arte Thema #Dieselgate documentary; in the Hard NOx first episode of the Netflix documentary Dirty Money; in Engine Trouble, the season 2 episode of the PBS series Playing by the Rules, Ethics at Work; in many TV media reports in Germany and elsewhere; and is featured in Jack Ewing’s book Faster, Higher, Farther, The Volkswagen Scandal.