P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans

GAUTAM MUKUNDA is the head of research at Rose Park Advisors, a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the host of NASDAQ's World Reimagined with Gautam Mukunda podcast.

Gautam was born in Washington, DC to parents of Indian origins. Now naturalized citizens, his parents live in Rockville, Maryland.

Gautam received a BA, magna cum laude, in Government from Harvard College and attended the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. At Harvard, he was captain of a National Champion Quiz Bowl Team and served on the Government Department Undergraduate Advisory Council. He finished his PhD in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his research focused on the role of leaders in organizational performance, innovation, and the social and political implications of advances in science and technology.

Gautam was a Program Coordinator at the Kennedy School of Government and a business analyst with McKinsey & Company. He served as a Managing Director of The Two Rivers Group, a consulting firm. He also founded a mathematics education company called Excelsior Education. Gautam serves as a member of the Board of Directors and Chair of the Mentorship Committee for Upakar, a national nonprofit that provides college scholarships for underprivileged Indian-Americans.

Gautam's work has been published in Parameters, Systems and Synthetic Biology, Politics and the Life Sciences, and Security Studies and he was featured in the documentary SynBioSafe. His first book Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2012.