Dr. Ajit Ranade

Dr. Ajit Ranade is Group Executive President and Chief Economist with the Aditya Birla Group. The Group’s businesses include metals, mining, chemicals, textiles, cement as well as telecom, insurance and asset management. He is a Member of the Economic Policy Council of the Confederation of Indian Industry and a Member of the National Executive Committee of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. He is Chair of the Research Advisory Panel of the Indian Institute of Banking and Finance and member of the Governing Council of CAFRAL of the RBI.

Ranade is on the boards of several academic institutions. He was a Member of the Capital Convertibility Committee of the Reserve Bank of India. He was a Member of the Governing Council of the Banking Codes and Supervisory Board of India. He is an engineer and MBA and received a PhD in Economics from Brown University, USA. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Bombay in 2009, Scholar of the Year Award from Wadia Trust in 2010, and Ramchandra Parnerkar Economics Award in 2012. He is a frequent contributor to the business press and writes regularly in newspapers on economic, social and political topics. He is a co-founder and Trustee of the Association for Democratic Reforms, an NGO working in area of electoral and political reforms.

Dr. Chandru Rajam

Dr. Chandru Rajam is Founder & CEO of RichFeedback, a provider of delegated-grading and learning-assessment services to universities and colleges globally. He previously served as Vice Provost for Graduate, Professional & Continuing Education at The College of New Jersey, and taught at George Washington University, National University of Singapore (NUS) and the University of Colorado.

Chandru was also previously Founder-CEO of EduMetry, a provider of technology solutions and services to the Education sector. At NUS, Dr. Rajam was Founding Director of the Executive MBA Program, ranked top-15 globally by Financial Times. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Dr. Rajam was Regional Director (Singapore) at EIU, a division of The Economist Group, where he led the Economist Corporate Network, overseeing research briefings on Business in Asia to the Asia-regional CEOs of global companies.

Dr. Rajam was Moderator of Business Week Conferences, advising editorially and chairing CEO, CFO and CIO conferences across Asia. A regular commentator on CNBC, BBC, NDTV & Bloomberg, Chandru has consulted for or taught in Programmes offered by Harvard Business School, Stanford GSB, Tuck-Dartmouth, IBM, McDonnell-Douglas, Mobil, GM, APL, Singapore Airlines, GE, Samsung, GSK, Elf Atochem etc. He was educated at Indian Institute of Technology (Engineering), Indian Institute of Management (MBA) and Pennsylvania State University (PhD, Business Strategy). A naturalized US citizen, Chandru was born and raised in Malaysia. He and his family live in Washington, DC.

Dr. Indira J Parikh

Prof. Indira J. Parikh is the President of Antardisha (Directions from Within). Antardisha is a private entity creating a space for individuals, collectivities, organizations and institutions to have a dialogue to discover themselves, to review their past, to reflect on the present ‘Here and Now’ and renew themselves for the future. Prof. Parikh is the Founder President of FLAME University, Pune until 2015. She has been involved in creating the academic vision of holistic and Liberal Education and shaping FLAME.

Prof. Parikh has done M.Ed from University of Rochester, New York USA and the Doctorate from Gujarat University. She was a faculty at IIM-Ahmedabad for over 30 years and Dean from 2002 to 2005. She has taught at INSEAD, Fontainebleau (France) and Texas A&M University. Professor Parikh is on several boards of companies as an independent director.

Prof. Parikh has been honored with several life time achievement awards both nationally and internationally for her contribution in Education, HR and for Women. She has written numerous articles published in National & International Journals and is the co-author/ author of several books. Her lifelong journey has been in education and transformation of women, men and youth to grow into fine human beings.

Recently, Prof. Parikh has joined DALHAME, the name stands for Design, Arts, Liberal Arts, Humanities, Architecture, Media and Economics. DALHAME Foundation is a not for profit organization which aims at increasing the importance of non-STEM education in both developing and developed nations, and introduce products which will serve as advance tool for admissions by bringing a new-age technology based analytics for institutions to hire students as per their need. DALHAME Foundation is in the process of creating Brilliance Entrance & Scholarship Test (BEST).

Currently, Prof. Parikh is engaged in developing Leadership Model conceptualized on Work Space, Social Space and Life Space anchored in self-reflectivity and identity.

Prof. Ravi Kumar

Prof. Ravi Kumar is currently Emeritus Professor at University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business on whose faculty he served for more than 27 years. He has also served as the Dean of Nanyang Business School in Singapore and Dean of KAIST College of Business in S. Korea.

He got his B. Tech degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India and his PhD from the Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences Department at Northwestern University.

Professor Kumar is an expert on global operations and supply chain management, the author or co-author of more than 70 articles in international peer-reviewed academic journals, like Management Science, Marketing Science, Production & Operations Management, Journal of Economic Theory etc. Companies that have funded his research include Nike, TRW, Fidelity Investments, Caterpillar, Bourns Instrument, Southern California Edison as well as the National Science Foundation.

Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan

Prof Rishikesha Krishnan is an author, columnist and professor of management who focuses on strategy, innovation, and education. He is listed in the Thinkers50 India list of most influential management thinkers from India.

Prof. Krishnan’s book 8 Steps to Innovation: Going from Jugaad to Excellence (co-authored with Vinay Dabholkar) won the Best Book Award for 2013-14 from the Indian Society for Training & Development. His earlier book From Jugaad to Systematic Innovation: The Challenge for India proposed a blueprint for how India can enhance its innovation output.

Prof. Krishnan has been on the on the faculty of IIM Bangalore since 1996, where he held the Jamuna Raghavan Chair in Entrepreneurship from 2007 to 2010. He was educated at IIT Kanpur, Stanford University and IIM Ahmedabad.

Prof. V.G. Narayanan

Professor Narayanan currently chairs the Elective Curriculum of the MBA Program at the Harvard Business School. He joined the HBS faculty in 1994 and has taught in several MBA, doctoral, and executive-education Programmes. He was the head of the Accounting and Management Unit from 2010 to 2015. He developed and taught the online accounting course in HBX CORe. His research and teaching interests include board of directors, executive compensation, audit committees, and cost management. He won the Greenhill award of outstanding contributions to HBS community in 2014, the Jim Bulloch Award for Innovations in Management Accounting Education in 2002, and the American Accounting Association Management Accounting section Best Paper Award in 2018.

Professor Narayanan has published articles and papers in the Harvard Business Review and several leading academic journals. He has worked with many companies in a variety of industries and locations all over the globe, and authored over seventy-five cases. He has been quoted by leading newspapers on issues relating to compensation, supply chain management, and accounting standards.

He is a member of the American Accounting Association and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. He serves on the board of directors of Leader Bank, MA, and the advisory board of SB International, TX. He also served on the board of trustees of Fessenden School, MA, from 2009-2016. On these boards, Professor Narayanan has chaired audit and governance and nomination committees, and has been a member of the compensation and strategic planning committees.

Professor Narayanan earned his Ph.D. in Business Administration, MA in Economics, and MS in Statistics at Stanford University. He received his Diploma in Management from the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad). He is a Chartered Accountant from India. Professor Narayanan began his career in public accounting at J. Gowrikanthan & Co., Chartered Accountants, Madras, India.

Prof. Rangarajan (Raghu) K. Sundaram

Rangarajan (“Raghu”) Sundaram has been the Dean of the Stern School of Business since January 1, 2018. He previously served as Stern’s Vice Dean of MBA Programmes for two years from January 2016 to December 2017. He has been a member of the Stern faculty since 1996 and was formerly at the University of Rochester from 1988-96.

As Dean and Vice Dean, Raghu has led a program of innovation that included the launch of focused one-year MBA Programmes; significant outreach to industry including securing the participation of business leaders from companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Infosys, PayPal, and others on the School’s newly created Tech MBA Advisory Board; the extension of the New York City-based Executive MBA program to downtown Washington, D.C., where it is now the highest ranked EMBA in that market; the establishment of the Creative Destruction Lab-New York City; and Stern’s entry into online education, including launching the first in a series of online certificate Programmes; among others. Raghu also has a long record of service to Stern and the University, including a two-year stint (2012-14) as the chair of the Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty Senators Council and serving as a member of NYU’s Presidential Search Committee in 2014.

Raghu received his BA in Economics from Loyola College, University of Madras, India in 1982, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad in 1984, and his MA and PhD in Economics from Cornell in 1987 and 1988, respectively. His research in finance covers a range of areas including agency problems, executive compensation, corporate finance, derivatives pricing, and credit risk & credit derivatives. He has also published extensively in mathematical economics, decision theory, and game theory. His research has appeared in leading academic journals in finance and economic theory as well as several practitioner-oriented journals. Among other distinctions, he has served on a number of editorial boards, received grants from the National Science Foundation and other organizations, won the Jensen Award, and been a finalist for the Brattle Prize.

Raghu is the author of two books: A First Course in Optimization Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Derivatives: Principles and Practice (McGraw-Hill, 2010). In 2007, he became the inaugural recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Stern School of Business.