Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School, where he has studied and worked with multinational and indigenous companies and investors in emerging markets worldwide. He was named Harvard University's Director of the South Asia Initiative in the fall of 2010. He joined the HBS faculty in 1993, after obtaining an engineering degree from Princeton University (1988) and a Ph.D. from Harvard (1993), and an interimstint on Wall Street. During this time, he has served as the head of several courses on strategy, corporate governance, and international business targeted to MBA students and senior executives at Harvard. He currently teaches in Harvard's executive education programs and is Faculty Chair for HBS activities in India.

His book, Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping Their Futures and Yours, was published in February 2008 by Harvard Business Press (Penguin in South Asia), and has been translated into several languages. It focuses on the drivers of entrepreneurship in China and India and builds on over a decade of work with companies, investors and non-profits in developing countries worldwide.

His most recent co-authored book, Winning in Emerging Markets: A Roadmap for Strategy and Execution, was published by Harvard Business Press in March 2010.

Outside HBS, he serves on the boards of the global power company, AES Corporation, and India's largest microfinance firm, SKS Microfinance, and on the advisory board of the Tata Opportunities Fund, along with several others in the financial services, energy, automotive, and life sciences sectors, and actively invests in and mentors startups in Asia. He also serves on the advisory boards of Parliamentary Research Services, an NGO dedicated to providing non-partisan research input to India's Members of Parliament to enhance the quality of democratic discourse and that of Primary Source, a Boston-based NGO dedicated to helping US schools, from K-12 grades, adopt curricular material reflecting global societies.

In 2007, he was nominated to be a Young Global Leader (under 40) by the World Economic Forum. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of International Business.