Professor Anant Agarwal founded edX — a global online learning platform — with Harvard and MIT as an experiment to make the world’s best education available to everyone. Today, as part of the digital educational company 2U, edX connects over 78 million people worldwide with online learning that delivers real professional progress across nearly every career discipline, from artificial intelligence and robotics to sustainability and public health

Much of this is the result of Anant’s commitment to achieving equality in learning and reshaping the way education is delivered. It also marks a remarkable journey for the MIT academic, who also taught edX’s first course on circuits and electronics. The course drew 155,000 students from 162 countries, providing an early sign of how things would develop. Now, edX gives learners access to over 4,300 online programs from 250 content partners worldwide.

Where fast-moving technology presents challenges — like automation — Anant aims to use it to create opportunities to access learning, making it fairer and more affordable. And that’s why edX has paved the way for modular, stackable learning, helping people learn at their own pace and stack courses and programs that can build up to a full degree.

A leading figure in computer architecture, Anant was an associate director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the ACM. Scientific American selected his work on organic computing as one of 10 World-Changing Ideas in 2011, and he was named in Forbes’ list of top 15 education innovators in 2012.