Gautam Mukunda
Contributor
Gautam Mukunda is an internationally recognized expert in leadership and innovation. He is the Head of Research at Rose Park Advisors, a firm co-founded by his mentor Clayton Christensen that provides companies that are supported by the theory of disruptive innovation the capital investment and strategy that allows them to grow to make the world a better place. Gautam is also a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, the author of Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012) and Picking Presidents: How To Make The Most Consequential Decision in the World (University of California Press, forthcoming October 2022), and the host of Nasdaq’s podcast World Reimagined with Gautam Mukunda.
Gautam has been a professor at Harvard Business School and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. He has published articles in Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, Security Studies, Slate, Fast Company, Parameters, Politics and the Life Sciences, and Systems and Synthetic Biology on topics including leadership, reforming the financial sector, military innovation, network-centric warfare, the security and economic implications of synthetic biology, and the TV show Mad Men. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, Economist, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and on All Things Considered.
Gautam was a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program and Program on Emerging Technologies. He was a Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow, an NSF IGERT Fellow, a Next Generation Fellow of The American Assembly, and a Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation’s Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center. He served on The Chief of Naval Operation’s Executive Advisory Panel and as a member of the New England Regional Selection Committee for the White House Fellowship and was a Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership. He was a Jeopardy Champion.
At MIT, Gautam was the National Science Foundation Synthetic Biology ERC Postdoctoral Fellow resident at MIT’s Center for International Studies. He received his PhD from MIT in political science focusing in International Relations and Security Studies, where he was a Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow and an NSF IGERT Fellow. He received his AB in Government from Harvard, magna cum laude. Before his academic career he was a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he focused on the pharmaceutical sector.
Gautam is a member of the board of directors and chair of the Mentorship Committee of The Upakar Foundation, a national non-profit devoted to providing college scholarships to underprivileged students of South Asian descent. He is on the Advisory Boards of Bionic Solutions and Fount Bio. He is an Overseer of the Boston Ballet and a member of the Museum Council of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.