The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship announced that Ana Bakshi has been named its new executive director. Bakshi stepped into the role at the start of the fall semester and will collaborate closely with the managing director, Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice Bill Aulet, to elevate the center to higher levels.
“Ana is uniquely qualified for this role. She brings a deep and highly decorated background in entrepreneurship education at the highest levels, along with exceptional leadership and execution skills,” says Aulet. “Since I first met her 12 years ago, I have been extraordinarily impressed with her commitment to create the highest-quality centers and institutes for entrepreneurs, first at King’s College London and then at Oxford University. This ideal skill set is compounded by her experience in leading high-growth companies, most recently as the chief operation officer in an award-winning AI startup. I’m honored and thrilled to welcome her to MIT — her knowledge and energy will greatly elevate our community, and the field as a whole.”
A rapidly changing environment creates imperative for raising the bar for entrepreneurship education
The need to raise the bar for innovation-driven entrepreneurship education is both timely and urgent. The rate of change is getting faster and faster every day, especially with artificial intelligence, and is generating new problems that need to be solved, as well as exacerbating existing problems in climate, health care, manufacturing, future of work, education, and economic stratification, to name but a few. The world needs more entrepreneurs and better entrepreneurs.
Bakshi joins the Trust Center at an exciting time in its history. MIT is at the forefront of helping to develop people and systems that can turn challenges into opportunities using an entrepreneurial mindset, skill set, and way of operating. Bakshi’s deep experience and success will be key to unlocking this opportunity. “I am truly honored to join the Trust Center at such a pivotal moment,” Bakshi says. “In an era defined by both extraordinary challenges and extraordinary possibilities, the future will be built by those bold enough to try, and MIT will be at the forefront of this.”
Translating academic research into real-world impact
Bakshi has a decade of experience building two world-class entrepreneurship centers from the ground up. She served as the founding director at King’s College and then at Oxford. In this role, she was responsible for all aspects of these centers, including fundraising.
While at Oxford, she authored a data-driven approach to determining efficacy of outcomes for their programs, as evidenced by a 61-page study, “Universities: Drivers of Prosperity and Economic Recovery.”
As the director of the Oxford Foundry (Oxford’s cross-university entrepreneurship center), Bakshi focused on investing in ambitious founders and talent. The center was backed by global entrepreneurial leaders such as the founders of LinkedIn and Twitter, with corporate partnerships including Santander and EY, and investment funds including Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE). As of 2021, the startups supported by the Foundry and King’s College have raised over $500 million and have created nearly 3,000 jobs, spanning diverse industries including health tech, climate tech, cybersecurity, fintech, and deep tech spinouts focusing on world-class science.
In addition, she built the highly successful and economically sustainable Entrepreneurship School, Oxford’s first digital online learning platform.
Bakshi comes to MIT after having worked in the private sector as the chief operating officer (COO) in a rapidly growing artificial intelligence startup for almost two years, Quench.ai, with offices in London and New York City. She was the first C-suite employee at Quench.ai, serving as COO and now senior advisor, helping companies unlock value from their knowledge through AI.
Right place, right time, right person moving at the speed of MIT AI
Since its inception, then turbocharged in the 1940s with the creation and operation of the RadLab, and continuing to this day, entrepreneurship is at the core of MIT’s identity and mission.
« MIT has been a leader in entrepreneurship for decades. It’s now the third leg of the school, alongside teaching and research,” says Mark Gorenberg ’76, chair of the MIT Corporation. “I’m excited to have such a transformative leader as Ana join the Trust Center team, and I look forward to the impact she will have on the students and the wider academic community at MIT as we enter an exciting new phase in company building, driven by the accelerated use of AI and emerging technologies. »
“In a time where we are rethinking management education, entrepreneurship as an interdisciplinary field to create impact is even more important to our future. To have such an experienced and accomplished leader in academia and the startup world, especially in AI, reinforces our commitment to be a global leader in this field,” says Richard M. Locke, John C Head III Dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
“MIT is a unique hub of research, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and that special mix creates massive positive impact that ripples around the world,” says Frederic Kerrest, MIT Sloan MBA ’09, co-founder of Okta, and member of the MIT Corporation. “In a rapidly changing, AI-driven world, Ana has the skills and experience to further accelerate MIT’s global leadership in entrepreneurship education to ensure that our students launch and scale the next generation of groundbreaking, innovation-driven startups.”
Prior to her time at Oxford and King’s College, Bakshi served as an elected councilor representing 6,000-plus constituents, held roles in international nongovernmental organizations, and led product execution strategy at MAHI, an award-winning family-led craft sauce startup, available in thousands of major retailers across the U.K. Bakshi sits on the advisory council for conservation charity Save the Elephants, leveraging AI-driven and scientific approaches to reduce human-wildlife conflict and protect elephant populations. Her work and impact have been featured across FT, Forbes, BBC, The Times, and The Hill. Bakshi was twice honored as a Top 50 Woman in Tech (U.K.), most recently in 2025.
“As AI changes how we learn, how we build, and how we scale, my focus will be on helping MIT expand its support for phenomenal talent — students and faculty — with the skills, ecosystem, and backing to turn knowledge into impact,” Bakshi says.
35 years of impact to date
The Trust Center was founded in 1990 by the late Professor Edward Roberts and serves all MIT students across all schools and all disciplines. It supports 60-plus courses and extensive extracurricular programming, including the delta v academic accelerator. Much of the work of the center is generated through the Disciplined Entrepreneurship methodology, which offers a proven approach to create new ventures. Over a thousand schools and other organizations across the world use Disciplined Entrepreneurship books and resources to teach entrepreneurship.
Now, with AI-powered tools like Orbit and JetPack, the Trust Center is changing the way that entrepreneurship is taught and practiced. Its mission is to produce the next generation of innovation-driven entrepreneurs while advancing the field more broadly to make it both rigorous and practical. This approach of leveraging proven evidence-based methodology, emerging technology, the ingenuity of MIT students, and responding to industry shifts is similar to how MIT established the field of chemical engineering in the 1890s. The desired result in both cases was to create a comprehensive, integrated, scalable, rigorous, and practical curriculum to create a new workforce to address the nation’s and world’s greatest challenges.