Bharat N. Anand, currently serving as vice provost at Harvard University, has been appointed the next dean of NYU’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. He will officially step into the role this August, also joining the faculty as a professor of business administration.
A prominent figure in corporate and digital media strategy, Anand has spent decades shaping the future of business education. He holds a chaired professorship at Harvard Business School (HBS), where he’s been on the faculty since 1998. Recognized for his expertise in helping digital businesses overcome the dual challenges of visibility and monetization, Anand’s influence has extended far beyond the classroom.
At HBS, he led the creation of the school’s first executive program focused on digital strategy for media companies and was instrumental in launching HBS Online, an innovative digital platform redefining business learning. As its founding faculty chair and senior associate dean, he helped scale the platform into a global education model.
During his tenure as Harvard’s vice provost, Anand guided the university’s shift to virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic and chaired a cross-campus task force to envision the future of learning. He also helped launch Axim, a nonprofit aimed at improving education access, and spearheaded the development of Harvard’s new learning experience platform to support hybrid and online education.
In 2018, he was named Harvard’s vice provost for advances in learning. More recently, he chairs the university’s Generative AI Working Group for Teaching and Learning.
Before joining Harvard, Anand taught at Yale’s School of Management. Over the years, he has accumulated an impressive portfolio of awards and honors, including the Henry R. Byers Professorship, Harvard’s Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence (twice), and the Robert Greenhill Award for Outstanding Contributions to HBS (also twice).
Anand is also an acclaimed author. His 2016 book The Content Trap: A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Change was named among the year’s best business books by Fast Company and Bloomberg, and received the Axiom Silver Award in Business Theory. His research has appeared in leading academic journals and won numerous scholarly accolades.
A Harvard graduate in economics with honors and a Ph.D. from Princeton, Anand’s upcoming role at NYU marks a new chapter in his distinguished career.
