Anna is co-founder and President of Varden, an applied AI company with a mission to bring frontier technology to organisations working to improve the state of the world. Varden builds AI products with governments, foundations, non-profits, and corporates, with a current portfolio spanning access to justice, healthcare, school nutrition, sustainability, and philanthropic capital.

Before Varden, Anna spent nearly a decade in senior leadership at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, the Nobel Prize-winning research and policy organisation co-founded by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. Her work spanned J-PAL's full sectoral range, including healthcare, education, labour markets, social protection, and the design of complex government systems. As Executive Director of J-PAL Europe at the Paris School of Economics, and later as Global Director of Innovation, she led multi-million-pound initiatives across more than 20 countries on the social inclusion of refugees and migrants, humanitarian protection, and policy and data infrastructure for national governments. She helped launch Teaching at the Right Level Africa, scaling foundational learning across the continent, and the Fund for Innovation in Development, the French government's flagship vehicle for evidence-based development funding. She was active as a researcher within the J-PAL network. Programmes informed by J-PAL research have reached more than 850 million people globally.

Anna holds a PhD from Princeton, where her dissertation, The Politics of Empathy, used natural language processing to examine why some global problems attract attention and resources while others are quietly neglected. She was a Centennial Fellow, a Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellow, and a Prize Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Society of Fellows. She holds a double first-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford, where she received the Gibbs Prize.