Dr Apoorva Palkar is the Founding Vice Chancellor of Maharashtra State Skills University (MSSU). She comes with academic experience of more than 28 years in Higher Education and has been an institution builder. She worked as Director Innovation, Incubation and Linkages at Savitribai Phule Pune University for four years prior to joining MSSU and has done pioneering work in start-ups and entrepreneurship. She has been a part of Skills Education for over a decade and has spearheaded mass skilling initiatives in the past.

A strong believer of networks she has contributed immensely in collaborating with various Universities, organisations and Governments in her past tenures and a 100 plus collaborations done in her last tenure. Innovator at heart she has worked on various projects leading to unconventional funding opportunities. Education policy making has been an area of her interest and she has been a Part of State Higher Education Council- Maharashtra under RUSA, Member Skill Committee- Government of India, Convener Task- Force Globalisation of Higher Education, Member AICTE, Member AIMA to name a few.
She is the Past National President of Association of Indian Management Schools (AIMS) She has been on the boards of various international agencies like ACBSB (USA), EFMD(Europe) and worked closely with UNSECOSOC Council and UN Procurement Division.

She has lead projects with Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) New Delhi on Universalisation of Indian traditional Knowledge system. She has led several consultancy projects with industry, governments, municipal corporations. A faculty of Marketing Management and Entrepreneurship she has been teaching, training MBA students, conducted more than 100 executive development programs for industry and trained more than 1000+ students in entrepreneurship. Application based research has been her interest and nine students have been awarded PhD under her. She has authored 5 books in Marketing
management and written 50 research papers, trend reports, 100 plus articles in newspapers and 50 plus conference paper presentations. A graduate in mathematics, post graduation in Business Management, Alumni of IIM-A she is the recipient of the prestigious Ravi J Mathai Fellow award and academic leadership award from Higher Education Forum (HEF).