Venkatesan was born in New Delhi, India and immigrated with her parents to the United States, first settling in Chicago, Illinois. She received her PhD in Economics from Vanderbilt University, while employed as an assistant professor of Business at Fisk University. During her employment at Fisk University, she continued her research on the economic status of Blacks following the Civil War through the mid-twentieth century. In 1998, she accepted a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis, where she held a joint appointment in Economics and African-American Studies. In 1999, Venkatesan entered the financial services sector as an equity analyst and from 2006 to 2012 she was an investor relations officer for three U.S. domiciled global insurers during their respective crises: Unum Group, AIG, and the Hartford Financial Services Group. In 2012, she exited her employment with the Hartford. In 2014, she re-entered academic employment as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Bridgewater State University. From 2015 to 2017, in addition to publishing more than 20 journal articles and book chapters, she published three economics text books under the series A Framework for Sustainable Practices: Economic Principles: A Primer, Foundations of Microeconomics and Foundations for Macroeconomics. In 2015, she appeared in a TEDx where she introduced the relationship between economics and sustainability. In the following year, she contributed to MacMillan Publishing's EconED with a presentation entitled Market prices, externalities and conscious consumption decisions. In 2017, she joined the faculty of the Department of Economics at Northeastern University as an Assistant Teaching Professor and was the featured guest of a Climate Matters news conference held at the 2017 United Nations Climate Change Conference. In 2018, she traveled to the Philippines as the Fulbright-SyCip Distinguished Lecturer. In 2019 she published her fourth text, SDG8 - Sustainable Economic Growth and Decent Work for All. In 2016, Venkatesan established Sustainable Practices, a 5013 nonprofit with a mission "to facilitate a culture of sustainability as defined by reducing the human-made impact to the planet and its ecosystems" within Barnstable County, Massachusetts and is the organization's executive director. In 2019, Sustainable Practices initiated the Municipal Plastic Bottle Ban campaign. By November 18, 2019, 11 towns of the 15 that comprise Barnstable County, Cape Cod, adopted the Municipal Plastic Bottle Ban. As of spring 2020, Sustainable Practices filed the Municipal Plastic Bottle Ban in the remaining 4 towns and initiated the Commercial Single-use Plastic Water Bottle Ban campaign in the 11 towns that successfully adopted the Municipal Plastic Bottle Ban.
Research
Venkatesan's academic interests include the integration of sustainability into the economics curriculum. She has been active in promoting education and stakeholder engagement to incorporate ethics into the existing economic framework and her written work has largely focused on these topics as a catalyst to promoting sustainability. Venkatesan has also contributed to the literature on the relationship between culture, sustainability and economics, addressing the relationship between economic systems and cultural convergence.
