Abha Kumar

Abha Kumar, our independent director, has over 30 years of operational experience delivering technology at enterprise scale at The New York Times, Dow Jones & Co. , and most recently at Vanguard ($7.6 trillion of assets under management (“AUM”) as of January 31, 2021.
Mr. Kumar is experienced in the fields of risk mitigation, cyber, cloud, and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (“AI”) / machine learning (“ML”), blockchain, virtual and augmented reality. At Vanguard (2007-2019), as Principal, she served as CIO for corporate and international and head of the first offshore shared services at Vanguard, where she established and led the first shared-services business unit with eight centers in Europe and Asia.
Prior to her role at Vanguard, Ms. Kumar was Vice President and Divisional CIO at Dow Jones & Co. (1999-2007), creating innovative strategies to drive change and reduce operating costs. Prior to that, she was Group Director at The New York Times (1986-1999), where she co-led a program to consolidate and modernize financial and HR functions. Currently, she serves on the Advisory Board of Shopelier (startup in e-commerce) and Shanti Bhavan (nonprofit residential education program for children from disadvantaged communities in India).
During her time at Vanguard, Ms. Kumar also founded LEAP (Leadership and Engagement for Asian Professionals) and served on Vanguard’s corporate Diversity Leadership Team and Talent Oversight Team for seven years. She speaks internationally on diversity and technological change and was recently awarded the Inspirational Women Leaders award by Roshni Media. She also received the 2018 American Business Association’s Gold Stevie® award for “Visionary for Creating Ecosystems of Tomorrow”.
Ms. Kumar graduated from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India and has a Masters from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India.