Anjali Sastry '86, PhD '95
Dr. Anjali Sastry is the first South Asian aluma to receive an undergraduate degree in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. She grew up in a multilingual household, with her Indian grandmother speaking four different languages, which may have inspired her to pursue a Bachelor of Science in both Physics and Russian Literature from MIT in 1986. Sastry now speaks five languages: English, French, German, Marathi, and Russian. She then went on to pursue a management science PhD in System Dynamics from MIT. Her thesis was titled Language and the A.B.M Treaty.
After graduating in 1995, Sastry became a management consultant at Bain & Company, then investigated electricity efficiency in India as a research scholar at Rocky Mountain Institute and Lawrence Berkeley Lab. Sastry was appointed Assistant Professor at Sloan School of Management in 2001, and she is currently a Senior Lecturer in Global Economics and Management and a Lecturer at Harvard Medical School. Building on her experience with on-site improvement projects in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, Sastry investigates health innovation in India. She founded and led Global Health Lab, which collaborates with selected enterprises on the front lines of healthcare delivery, and she is also both Faculty Director of Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab and Associate Dean for Open Learning.
Dr. Anjali Sastry Freshman Photo 1982