Avani Desai

Avani Desai is a Clinical faculty member in the Communication area at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA), where she has taught since 2010. She teaches Written Analysis and Communication (I and II), Workshop on Interviews and Presentations and Managerial Communication to students of the PGP and PGP-FABM, as well as Management Communication to the PGPX cohort. She also teaches at multiple executive education programs at the Institute.

Her research sits at the intersection of communication, finance, and reputation — with sustained interest in investor relations, corporate reputation, brand valuation, and, more recently, behavioural finance, financial literacy and women’s entrepreneurship. She has published in journals including the International Journal of Communication, the International Journal of Innovation Science, Vikalpa: The Journal for Decision Makers, and Finance India, and has contributed chapters to the Sage Encyclopedia of Corporate Reputation as well as to volumes from Palgrave Macmillan and IGI Global. She is the co- author of Corporate Reputation Decoded: Building, Managing and Strategizing for Corporate Excellence (Sage, 2014), among the first book-length treatments of corporate reputation in the Indian context. Her work has earned multiple research awards such as at the 11th Asia-Pacific Conference of the Association of Business Communication in Seoul.

Professor Desai holds a PhD in Investor Relations from Dharmsinh Desai University, and an MBA in Finance from the B. K. School of Business Management, Gujarat University. Before moving to academia, she worked in corporate finance at Adani Enterprises, now the Adani Group.

Beyond IIMA, she has been a Visiting Faculty at the Indian School of Business (ISB) Hyderabad, MICA, and EDII, and has advised on research and curriculum design for universities such as Nirma University, Pandit Deendayal Energy University, Gujarat University, among others. She sits on the Board of Studies at PDEU and at the B. K. School of Business Management. She has supervised six doctoral students to completion at GLS University and PDEU. She serves as a reviewer for Cogent Business and Management (Taylor & Francis) and for Emerald’s Corporate Communications: An International Journal and Journal of Emerging Markets. Earlier, she was Professor and Dean of the School of Doctoral Research and Innovation at GLS University, and before that, Dean of its Faculty of Business Administration.

She is a co-founder of an online non-profit writing centre focused on developing writing skills among Indian high school students, and a former President of the Ahmedabad Book Club. She was recognised with the Inspiring Women Award in 2022.