Meet the executives who drive our success

Elias Niyonsaba

Founder & CEO

LinkedIn profile

Elias Niyonsaba is the Founder and CEO of AskField and the CEO of Ethical Research Solution, a research and insights firm he has led since December 2015. Over the past decade, he has helped organizations turn complex market and consumer questions into clear, credible, and actionable intelligence that informs both business and development decisions.

Through Ethical Research Solution, Elias has led and delivered research across market strategy, consumer intelligence, public affairs, brand health tracking, mystery shopping, social intelligence, corporate reputation, retail, and customer experience. His approach combines practical field experience with a strong commitment to research ethics, methodological rigor, and statistical standards, ensuring that insights are not only useful, but trusted.

Elias founded AskField from a simple conviction: research teams should not have to piece together multiple disconnected tools to run a study from start to finish. Drawing on years of experience managing real-world research projects, he envisioned a platform built around how research actually happens, from survey design and multi-mode data collection to CATI, field operations, analytics, and qualitative analysis.

Today, AskField brings these capabilities together in one platform, enabling research firms, corporate insights teams, and organizations to manage studies across offline CAPI, high-volume telephone interviewing, field operations, mixed-mode tracking, quantitative analytics, and qualitative research. The platform is designed to work in the realities of the field, including environments where connectivity is limited and research teams need dependable tools that can scale.

Elias is passionate about making high-quality research more accessible, connected, and actionable, helping organizations move from fragmented data collection to a more unified approach to evidence, insight, and decision-making.

Sarah Thompson

VP of Product

Sarah joined AskField to lead product strategy and innovation. She oversees the survey workspace, question logic, distribution, quality control, CATI operations, AskQual, and analytics so project managers, interviewers, and analysts can work in one system without losing the depth specialists need. Previously, Sarah held senior product leadership roles at enterprise SaaS companies serving operations-heavy teams, where she owned roadmaps for complex workflow products and turned live customer research into shipped features. She is known for spending time on real studies—how quotas are filled, how skip logic is tested, how field teams sync offline interviews, and where reporting breaks down—and converting that into a product-led experience that still supports advanced methodology. Sarah holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Michigan and an M.B.A. from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Michael Chen

VP of Engineering

Michael joined AskField to lead engineering and works closely with product, design, and customer teams to define the technical vision for the platform. He oversees the web application, mobile apps, CATI and dialer infrastructure, public APIs, and the data layer behind analytics and AskQual. Previously, as a senior engineering leader at cloud and data-platform companies, he scaled service-oriented architectures, built offline-capable mobile systems, and moved organizations to continuous delivery. Before that he held engineering management roles focused on security, reliability, and high-volume data pipelines. Michael’s teams design for conditions most SaaS products never see—concurrent CATI sessions, large sample files, multi-language questionnaires, and regional hosting—while supporting the security and compliance reviews enterprise and public-sector customers require. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.