The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship has announced that Ana Bakshi has been appointed as new executive director. Bakshi will step into the role at the start of the fall semester and will work closely with Managing Director, Professor Practical Bill Aulet, Professor Ethernet Inventor, to take the center to a higher level.
“Ana is uniquely qualified for this role. She brings a deep, highly decorated background with exceptional leadership and execution skills in the highest level of entrepreneurship education,” Aulet says. “Since I first met 12 years ago, I was very impressed with her commitment to creating a top quality centre and laboratory for entrepreneurs, first at King’s College London and then at Oxford University. The community, and the field as a whole.”
A rapidly changing environment is essential for raising bars for entrepreneurship education
The need to raise the standards for innovation-driven entrepreneurship education is both timely and urgent. Rates of change are becoming faster and faster every day, especially with artificial intelligence, creating new problems that need to be solved, exacerbating existing problems in the stratification of climate, healthcare, manufacturing, work, education and the economy. The world needs more entrepreneurs and better entrepreneurs.
Bakshi joins the Trust Centre at an exciting time in its history. MIT is at the forefront of helping entrepreneurs develop people and systems that can transform challenges into opportunities, using their mindset, skill sets, and operational methods. Bakshi’s deep experience and success are key to unlocking this opportunity. “It’s a real honor to be part of a trust centre at such a pivotal moment,” Bakshi says. “In an age defined by both extraordinary challenges and extraordinary possibilities, the future is built by people bold enough to give it a try, and MIT is at the forefront of this.”
Translate academic research into real-world influences
Bakshi has 10 years of experience building two world-class entrepreneurship centres from the ground up. She was founding director at King’s College and at Oxford. In this role, she was responsible for all aspects of these centres, including fundraising.
While in Oxford, she wrote a data-driven approach to determining the effectiveness of the outcomes of their programmes, as evidenced by the 61-page study, “College: Factors of Prosperity and Economic Recovery.”
As the director of the Oxford Foundry (Entrepreneurship Centre across Oxford University), Bakshi focused on investing in ambitious founders and talent. The centre was supported by global entrepreneurs leaders such as LinkedIn and Twitter founders, as well as corporate partnerships such as Santander and EY, and investment funds including Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE). As of 2021, the startups supported by Foundry and King’s College have spanned a wide range of industries, including Health Tech, Climate Tech, Cybersecurity, Fintech and Deep Tech Spinout, which have raised over $500 million, created nearly 3,000 jobs, and focused on world-class science.
Additionally, she built Oxford’s first digital online learning platform, the highly successful and economically sustainable school of entrepreneurship.
Bakshi came to MIT after working in the private sector as the chief operating officer at a rapidly growing artificial intelligence startup for nearly two years, with offices in London and New York City. She was the first C-Suite employee at Quench.ai, and is the COO and now Senior Advisor, helping to unlock value from knowledge through AI.
The right person to travel at the right place, the right time, the speed of MIT AI
Since its inception, it has acquired a turbocharger in the creation and operation of Radlab in the 1940s, and continues to this day, entrepreneurship is at the heart of MIT’s identity and mission.
“MIT has been a leader in entrepreneurship for decades, and now it’s the third round of school, in addition to education and research,” says Mark Gorenberg ’76, chairman of MIT Corporation. “We look forward to having transformative leaders who will join ANA in the Trust Center team. We look forward to the impact that ANA has on MIT students and the wider academic community as they enter an exciting new phase in the company’s building.”
“In an age where we are rethinking management education, entrepreneurship as an impact-generating interdisciplinary field is even more important for our future. Having experienced and skilled leaders in AI, especially in the academia and startup worlds, reinforces our commitment to becoming a global leader in this field.
“MIT is a unique hub of research, innovation and entrepreneurship, and its special mix creates a huge, undulating, positive impact around the world,” says Frederic Kerrest, co-founder of OKTA and a member of 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 students launch and expand the next generation of groundbreaking, innovation-driven startups.”
Prior to his time at Oxford and King’s College, he served as an elected council member representing more than 6,000 members, played roles in international non-governmental organizations, and led product execution strategies at Mahi, an award-winning, family-led craft source startup. A scientific approach to reducing conflicts in human life and protecting elephant populations. Her work and impact are covered all over the board ft, ForbesBBC, The eraand hill. Bakshi was recently recognized twice in 2025 as the Top 50 Women in Tech (UK).
“As AI changes how we learn, build and expand, it will focus on helping MIT expand its support for students and faculty, an incredible talent to turn skills, ecosystems and knowledge into impact,” says Bakshi.
The impact of the past 35 years
The Trust Center was founded in 1990 by the late Professor Edward Roberts and serves all MIT students in all schools and fields. It supports over 60 courses and extensive extracurricular programming, including Delta V Academic Accelerator. Much of the center’s work is generated through disciplined entrepreneurship methodology and provides a proven approach to creating new ventures. It is about teaching entrepreneurship by over 1,000 schools and other organizations around the world using trained entrepreneurship books and resources.
Now, using AI-powered tools like Orbit and Jetpack, Trust Center is changing the way entrepreneurship is taught and practiced. Its mission is to advance the sector more broadly to make it rigorous and practical while generating the next generation of innovation-driven entrepreneurs. This approach, which leverages proven evidence-based methodology, emerging technologies, ingenuity and ingenuity among MIT students, and response to industrial shifts, is similar to how MIT established the field of chemical engineering in the 1890s. The desired outcome in both cases was to create a comprehensive, integrated, scalable, rigorous, practical curriculum to create a new workforce to address the nation’s biggest challenges and the world’s largest.
