Dr. Aparna Rao is an Associate Professor with NMIMS (Navi Mumbai). She is leading the Entrepreneurship Cell and working towards building the ecosystem there. Alongside, she continues to engage with several educational institutions and NGOs for their entrepreneurship-related activities. She provides capacity building and support for grass-root entrepreneurship through self-help groups.
She comes with vast teaching and leadership experience from academics and the entrepreneurship ecosystem. After two and a half decades in teaching and consultancy, she joined IIT Bombay’s DS School of Entrepreneurship as Senior Project Manager in 2014.
She has been associated as visiting faculty member with some of the leading B-Schools and Engineering institutes in Mumbai, like Sardar Patel College of Engineering and Institute of Information Technology, Fr. Agnel’s, SIESCOMS, Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, KJ Somaiya and DBIT. She specializes in Business Communication and has a passion for Entrepreneurship. As an Associate Professor at Chetana’s Institute of Management and Research (CIMR) earlier, she led courses and innovative pedagogical methods for Business Communication and; Entrepreneurship.
As a founding staff member on the team at DSSE, (formerly Centre for Entrepreneurship at IIT Bombay), she worked ground up, to set up the academic courses and programs that would enable student-led start-ups. Aparna is now an honorary mentor and consultant at DSSE. She works closely with students and women entrepreneurs as a mentor in the early stages of their start-up journeys for bringing value to their business model development.
Aparna's work with community development at the grass-root level includes rural women in Palghar, Silvassa, Kolhapur and Sangli.
She remains connected to her first love – language and literature as a Cambridge-certified English language examiner.
Aparna holds a Ph.D. in Management and a double Master’s in English and Management from University of Mumbai. In 2017, she was conferred the Jagadguru Shankaracharya National Award for her work in the field of education at the hands of His Holiness Jagadguru Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswathi by the NES-SVB Group of Institutions. Aparna, thus, in short, may be described as an academician and a social entrepreneur.