NYU Names Bharat N. Anand as Dean of the Stern School of Business
Expert in Corporate and Digital Strategy To Begin As Dean of NYU’s Business School in August 2025
NYU President Linda G Mills and Provost Georgina Dopico today announced that, following an international search, Bharat N. Anand—a vice provost at Harvard University and a chaired professor and renowned teacher at Harvard Business School (HBS)—has been named the Richard R. West Dean of NYU’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business and professor of business administration. He assumes his new duties in August 2025.
An expert in corporate, media, and digital strategy, Professor Anand’s work has focused on the central challenges for digital businesses of “getting noticed” and “getting paid.” An influential voice in the area of digital transformation, he created HBS’s first executive program on digital strategies for media companies. As the founding faculty chair and first senior associate dean of HBS Online, he helped launch and grow its innovative new model for business education. As Harvard’s vice provost for advances in learning, he helped steer Harvard’s teaching through the pandemic; convened the university-wide task force on the future of learning; contributed to the creation of Axim, a non-profit dedicated to expanding access in education; and led the creation of a new learning experience platform—helping shape the University’s strategy for residential and online education.
President Mills said, “NYU is absolutely thrilled with the appointment of Bharat Anand to lead Stern. He is an outstanding choice—deeply strategic, possessed of a global outlook, innovative, highly respected, and exceptionally effective. He greatly impressed the Search Committee, Provost Gigi Dopico, and me with his energy, his success both as a leader in a school and across a university environment, his highly entrepreneurial outlook, his insights into how technology can be used most productively, and his achievements as a scholar and talents as a teacher. He is known for his intellectual curiosity and for being a careful listener. He has a reputation for deftly building common ground and for cultivating partnerships widely. And at a moment when discourse on important matters has become so rancorous and divisive, his experience leading a university working group on enabling difficult conversations will be very welcome, indeed. We are so excited to welcome Bharat Anand to NYU.
“I want to thank the members of the Search Committee—and particularly its chair, Mor Armony—for their discernment and all the hard work and long hours they put into identifying candidates for the deanship. Gigi and I are very grateful to them—the outcome of their effort has been nothing short of excellent.”
Dean Anand said, “I am honored to be named dean of the Leonard N. Stern School of Business. Stern not only has a superb reputation, it possesses a remarkable spirit—entrepreneurial, determined, energetic, resourceful, and global. I was so delighted and impressed with everyone I met during the search process, and I’m excited to join this vibrant community and contribute to all that Stern is and aspires to be in the years ahead.”
Professor Anand comes to NYU from Harvard University, where he has been a member of the HBS faculty since 1998, when he joined as an assistant professor of business administration, after previously serving on the faculty at Yale University’s School of Management. He was named the Henry R. Byers Professor of Business Administration in 2006, the faculty chair in 2013 and later senior associate dean of Harvard Business School Online, and Harvard University’s vice provost for advances in learning in 2018. He is the chair of Harvard’s Generative AI Working Group for Teaching and Learning.
He is a widely published and influential scholar and author. His 2016 book, The Content Trap: A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Change, was named a “Top 10 Book” by Fast Company and Bloomberg and was awarded the Axiom Business Book Silver Award for Best Book in “Business Theory.” His research has been published in leading journals in strategy, economics, and marketing, and his articles and cases have received multiple scholarly awards. His many other honors and awards include selection to the Princeton Junior Society of Fellows during his graduate studies, twice receiving the Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence at Harvard Business School, and twice receiving the Robert Greenhill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Harvard Business School, among others.
Professor Anand received his bachelor’s degree in economics, magna cum laude, from Harvard and his PhD in economics from Princeton University.