ANEESHA KUMAR is a graduate of the FTMBA Class of 2026 and a Forté Fellow, specializing in technology leadership and AI and global management. Prior to Anderson, Kumar built a diverse background in strategy and operations across media, technology and advertising. She managed performance marketing at KQED, launched a zero-to-one escalation management system at fitness technology startup Tempo Fitness and developed data-driven audit and marketing processes at digital advertising agency MuteSix. She earned her B.S. in business administration from the University of Southern California.

At Anderson, Kumar demonstrated a strong commitment to technology, operations and community leadership. She was actively involved in AnderTech, helping organize technology treks to Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, where students engaged with industry leaders across the tech ecosystem. She also served as executive vice president of the Strategy and Operations Management Association (SOMA), helping coordinate the club’s programming and connecting classmates with professionals across operations, supply chain and strategy roles.

To broaden her global perspective, Kumar pursued the Global Management specialization through coursework including Global Trends, Global Supply Chain Management, Technology Innovation and Strategy, and the Global Immersion India course. As part of the India immersion led by Professor Romain Wacziarg, she traveled to Mumbai and Hyderabad to examine the country’s rapidly evolving business landscape, with particular focus on the entertainment, financial services, technology and healthcare sectors. The experience deepened her understanding of how emerging markets balance growth opportunities with structural challenges such as infrastructure constraints and income inequality. Among her most influential courses, Global Supply Chain Management provided frameworks that strengthened her analytical approach to operational decision-making and reinforced her interest in large-scale business systems.

During her MBA studies, Kumar further explored the intersection of strategy and operations through internships at Fox Entertainment and Amazon. As a strategy and operations MBA intern at Fox Entertainment, she conducted competitive and market analyses to identify potential M&A opportunities and developed forecasting models to support advertising revenue planning. She later joined Amazon’s XL Supply Chain team in Seattle, where she helped build a predictive inventory-reallocation model projected to generate more than $41 million in annual savings as well as an automated vendor-prioritization dashboard used to inform cross-dock routing decisions. These experiences solidified her interest in solving complex operational challenges through data-driven analysis and scalable process improvement.

Through her experiences at Anderson, Kumar strengthened her understanding of global business, operations and strategy while gaining firsthand exposure to the opportunities and challenges facing organizations around the world. Her coursework, global immersion experience and internships reinforced her interest in solving complex operational problems at scale. She looks forward to leveraging her UCLA Anderson global experiences and learnings as she continues to advance in her career and develop as a global business leader.