Anjali Sastry

Anjali Sastry is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and also serves as a Lecturer at Harvard Medical School's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine since 2011. She is affiliated with the Global Economics and Management academic group and the Behavioral and Policy Sciences area at MIT Sloan, and is associated with the MIT Leadership Center. As a Principal Investigator with MIT's Tata Center for Technology and Design, she investigates health innovation in India.

Sastry's research focuses on organizational and managerial effectiveness in complex settings, particularly examining practical management approaches for improving healthcare delivery in resource-limited markets. Her work connects management, strategy, systems approaches, and design thinking with global health and action learning. She has extensive experience with on-the-ground improvement projects in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, conducting field studies and impact assessments while collaborating with domain experts and frontline practitioners.

Her teaching innovations include founding and leading the GlobalHealth Lab, which has overseen 75 projects addressing management, operations, and strategy for healthcare enterprises. She teaches across multiple levels including undergraduates, MBAs, PhD students, and executive education programs at Harvard, University of Michigan, and MIT. Her research has appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly, Energy Policy, and Corporate Reputation Review.

Sastry serves on the board of directors and executive committee of Management Sciences for Health, and advises organizations including Tata Trusts, WonderWork, Ashoka Foundation, Merck for Mothers, and the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation. She is a frequent collaborator with the Global Health Delivery Project at Harvard University, MIT's D-Lab, and the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.

Her publications include two books: "Parenting Your Child with Autism" (2012) and "Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner" (2014), along with numerous academic articles and contributions to Fast Company, Huffington Post, and Quartz. She is currently working on her third book with Yasheng Huang examining the educational and social impact of action learning.

Sastry holds an SB in physics, an SB in Russian Language, and a PhD in system dynamics, all from MIT. Her professional background includes management consulting at Bain and Company and research positions at Rocky Mountain Institute and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.