Dr. Lynsey Farrell is the Director of Research and Thought Leadership at the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT. 

She joined MIT from the University of Pennsylvania where she was a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and the Africa program lead at the Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies. She spearheaded the annual Lauder Africa Futures Conference, an interdisciplinary and intersectoral event focused on bringing together over 500 business leaders, academics, NGO practitioners, policy makers, and entrepreneurs for conversations about Africa's potential. 
She also coordinated the Lauder Global Business Insights report, converting student writing into an anthology of business trends and insights from around the world. 
Over two decades, Lynsey's work has focused on the intersections of youth, international development, urbanization, and entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa. She completed extended field research among youth-self-help groups in the Kibera settlement of Nairobi while directing American University's Kenya program on Sustainable International Development. A scholar-practitioner, she spent several years at Ashoka: Innovators for the Public as the program director for the MasterCard Foundation funded Future Forward: Innovations in Youth Employment in Africa initiative, she curated and facilitated the Future of Work in Africa course, co-authored a report called Youth Unstuck: Innovations in Youth Livelihoods and Leadership in Africa, and pioneered the Ashoka Emerging Insights report, which showcases the latest trends in social innovation around the world. 
Since 2018, she has been on the board of the action research organization, Grandmother Project, and co-founded the Grandmother Collective in 2021 to promote the powerful role that grandmothers and older women in every community and culture play as co-leaders in social and environmental change. She received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Boston University.