Anjali Sastry

Dr Anjali Sastry is the faculty director of the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a centre that promotes excellence and transformation in education globally. Anjali has worked closely with J-WEL since its founding in 2017, supporting its work to address opportunities for scalable change in global education by engaging educators, technologists, policymakers, societal leaders, employers and employees through in-person and online collaborations, workshops, research and information-sharing events.

Anjali also acts as associate dean for Open Learning at MIT, senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and principal investigator at MIT’s Tata Center for Technology and Design, where she investigates health innovation in India. Her professional experience includes assistant professor roles at MIT Sloan School of Management, management consulting at Bain and Company and research positions at Rocky Mountain Institute in India and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

Drawing on her academic grounding in system dynamics, organisational theory and action research, Anjali’s research focuses on practical management approaches to improving the delivery of needed services and goods in resource-limited markets, via extensive field work in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and beyond. In 2007, she founded MIT’s GlobalHealth Lab, which connects MIT graduate students with front line healthcare delivery enterprises in Africa and Asia to tackle pressing challenges and yield new insights about improving health care delivery in low-resource settings.

As a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Anjali teaches accessible classes including MITx, co-developed with Solve, and MIT Sloan’s ‘Breakthrough ventures’ course on effective business models in frontier markets. Anjali’s publications include academic and conference papers as well as books including 'Fail better: Design smart mistakes and succeed sooner' (2014), a guide to orchestrating failure and learning in the workplace, and 'Parenting your child with autism: Practical solutions, strategies and advice for helping your family' (2012), co-authored with Blaise Aguirre, which draws on her personal and academic background.

Anjali took a bachelor’s degree in physics and a PhD in system dynamics from MIT. She serves on the board of directors of TomorrowNow.org and educational non-profit ResearchILD. She is former advisor in residence to Tata Trust, a founding advisor to shift7 and member of the global nonprofit board of  management sciences for Health and Boston’s The Learning Project. She is a lecturer in Harvard Medical School's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and faculty advisor to the MIT Legatum Center for Entrepreneurship and Development.