Manish Bhardwaj

Manish Bhardwaj founded and leads IIH’s India operations in Bihar. Prior to co-founding IIH, he was a co-founder and Chief Architect at Engim Inc., a private venture-backed wireless semiconductor startup. Bhardwaj is a Fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. He has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bhardwaj is a recipient of MIT's Graduate Teaching Award.

Bhardwaj has worked in healthcare for more than a decade, including a 3-year stint in Afghanistan, where he was part of research teams surveying and studying that country’s fledgling healthcare system. His interests lie in understanding the socio-economic dynamics of rural Bihar, and their impact on healthcare. He has a M.A. from Jamia Millia Islamia, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Patna.

Bhardwaj directs Keller Center's Design for Innovation program for faculty in the humanities and social sciences. He was previously the James Wei Visiting Professor at Keller, where he taught idealism in entrepreneurship. Bhardwaj is the CEO and co-founder of Innovators In Health, which is devoted to delivering world-class healthcare to the rural poor in India. He is also a Fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. He believes that a venture to make the world more just is fundamentally a moral, not technical, undertaking. It requires cultivating a moral imagination, an ability to imagine why people do right or wrong, the root of empathy, itself the root of all enduring change. He believes that accompaniment, to stand with the marginalized, literally and figuratively, is a moral imperative, and in and of itself a powerful means of change.