Chintan Vaishnav is a Senior Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management and a member of the founding team of MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design. He is a socio-technologist, an engineer trained to understand human as well as technological complexity in large systems. Vaishnav is interested in creating socio-technical systems for improving lives in underserved communities, and in analyzing the implications of promoting and managing such technologies for policymakers, managers, and society at large.

Vaishnav's research, teaching, and action spans technology, development, and policy. In the area of technology and development, he has designed and teaches a graduate-level course on Technology, Design, and Entrepreneurship for Emerging Community at MIT. The objectives of this course are: to enable students to understand the challenges of designing solutions for development; to frame research to address such challenges by applying design and systems thinking; and to produce solutions that are rigorous, relevant, and marketable. His research on technology and development focuses on designing information technologies and systems to improve lives of agricultural communities.