Vijaya Sunder M is an Assistant Professor of Operations Management (Practice) and Programme Director of the Operational Excellence for Leaders Programme at the Indian School of Business (ISB). He also serves on the advisory board of ISB’s Executive Fellow Programme in Management and Executive Education. Previously, he was Chair of the Experiential Learning Programme (2022-2025), Academic Director of the Centre for Business Innovation (2023–2024), and a BAT Research Fellow (2021–2023).
He holds a PhD in Operational Excellence from IIT Madras and brings over 18 years of industry experience from global corporations. He has served as Head of Business Process Excellence at the World Bank Group, Assistant Vice President at Barclays, and Quality Leader at American Express and Citi.
Professor Sunder’s research focuses on operational excellence, project management, behavioural operations, and human-AI collaboration. He has authored three books and published scholarly research in leading journals, including Production and Operations Management, Journal of Operations Management, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, International Journal of Production Economics, International Journal of Production Research, Journal of Business Research, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. His articles have also appeared in Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Management and Business Review, and Rotman Management. His teaching case studies, published by Harvard Business Publishing, are among the bestsellers.
Professor Sunder has received several prestigious honours, including ASQ’s Global Crosby Award, IAQ’s
Walter E. Masing Award, and recognition as one of PEX Network’s (IQPC) Top 50 Operational Excellence Thought Leaders worldwide. In 2025, he was featured in Business Mint’s 50 Under 50 Brightest Minds of India for his contributions to the field of Operational Excellence. He is also a recipient of IIT Madras Best Researcher Award in 2018, the Quality Champion Award (Gold category) by the Quality Control of India (QCI), Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Government of India in 2022, and the Financial Times Responsible Business Education Award (Runner-up) in 2022.
At ISB, he teaches PGP, Executive MBA, and PhD courses such as Business Process Excellence, Operational Excellence, Digital Transformation in Services, Project Management, and Operations Management. He has won multiple “Professor of the Year” – Best Teacher: Teaching Excellence Awards for the PGP core and elective courses for the Class of 2021 (one award), Class of 2023 (two awards), Class of 2024 (one award), Class of 2025 (three awards), and the AMPH Class of 2024 (one award).
A TEDx speaker and sought-after keynote presenter, Professor Sunder has trained over 10,000 business executives worldwide and is widely known for his innovative and experiential pedagogies.
Sarang Deo is a Professor of Operations Management at the Indian School of Business (ISB), where he also serves as the Deputy Dean for Faculty and Research and as the Executive Director of the Max Institute of Healthcare Management (MIHM).
His primary area of research is health care delivery systems. He is interested in investigating the impact of operations decisions on population-level health outcomes. Some of the healthcare contexts that he has studied include the influenza vaccine supply chain and the phenomenon of ambulance diversion in the US, HIV early infant diagnosis networks in sub-Saharan Africa, and formal and informal pathways for tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis in India. He regularly collaborates with international public health funding and implementation agencies such as Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), and PATH for his research. He currently serves as a member of the WHO Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on TB (STAG-TB).
Prior to joining ISB, Professor Deo was an Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management. He holds a PhD from UCLA Anderson School of Management, an MBA from Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad, and a B Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. Before entering academia, he worked with Accenture as a management consultant.
