Ajay is an economist and professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He conducts research on the economics of innovation and entrepreneurship. He is the founder of the Creative Destruction Lab – a not-for-profit with a mission to enhance the commercialization of science for the betterment of humankind. He is also a cofounder of NEXT Canada, a not-for-profit focused on founder development. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts; an academic advisory council member at the Center on Regulation and Markets at Brookings in Washington, DC; an advisory board member at Carnegie Mellon University’s Block Center for Technology and Society in Pittsburgh; and a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto. He is co-founder of Sanctuary – a company with a mission to create the world’s first human-like intelligence in general-purpose robots. Ajay was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2022.