Ph.D. Student Spotlight

Meenal Banga

Meenal Banga is a Ph.D. candidate in strategy and is on the academic job market for 2025-2026. She studies counterfactual imagination in the space economy under the mentorship of Luis Martins (chair), Ram Ranganathan, Cha Li, and Violina Rindova. She recently presented her work at the Strategic Management Society Conference in San Francisco and at the Academy of Management Conference in Copenhagen. Her dissertation work is short-listed as one of eight finalists for the 2025 INFORMS/Organization Science Dissertation Proposal Competition. Banga’s goal with this research stream is to reconceptualize imagination as structured and teachable, moving beyond its usual treatment as free-associative or whimsical and advancing an understanding of it as a skill that can be developed, taught, and strategically mobilized in practice. Her current projects include an invited revise-and-resubmit at Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. More details, including her CV, are available at www.meenalbanga.com