Johns Hopkins Carey Business School MBA graduates Erika Ito and Anika Mistry are among the Best and Brightest MBA graduates for 2026, according to Poets & Quants. This is the second year in a row that two Carey students received the honor in the same year. The influential online digest’s annual list recognizes 100 full-time MBA graduates from elite business schools around the world. Ito and Mistry were both recognized for their academic excellence, community leadership, and professional potential.
Senior Editor Jeff Schmitt said Poets & Quants Best and Brightest are the leaders who rally, the mentors who champion, the visionaries who awaken, and the volunteers who shoulder the heaviest burdens.
“I call them the most indispensable members of their classes. They are the driving forces, the ones who always go above and beyond and find a way,” said Schmitt. “In every situation, they elevate the ideas, energy, and teamwork of their classmates. In the process, they embody the values of higher education: curiosity, integrity, generosity, and accountability.”
Erika Ito (MBA/MPH ’26)
Ito is an accomplished runner, musician, and doctor who will be joining Eli Lilly and Company as a senior manager following graduation. She was also honored as a Top 100 Leader of Tomorrow by the 54th St. Gallen Symposium, which recognizes interdisciplinary leadership at the intersection of medicine, business, and global health.
Ito is most proud of the work she did during her MBA internship with Eli Lilly and Company, designing and implementing an AI-enabled competitive intelligence framework to reshape how senior leadership makes strategic oncology decisions.
“This experience marked a turning point in my career: moving from delivering excellence as an individual clinician to enabling better decisions at scale within complex organizations,” she said. “It crystallized my commitment to building human-centered, data-driven systems that improve health outcomes far beyond any single patient or institution.”
Ito said she chose Carey because it uniquely integrates business education with medicine and public health, “allowing me to translate clinical insight into scalable health innovation.”
She noted that Carey’s proximity to Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health made it possible to move beyond theoretical strategy and focus on implementation, including how decisions are made, governed, and sustained in real health systems.
Steven Cohen, professor of practice at Carey, said, “Erika Ito is an exceptional MBA student whose intellectual curiosity, humility, and determination distinguish her from her peers. Erika’s dedication to continuous growth, coupled with the discipline to follow through, distinguishes her as a future leader. I am confident that Erika has an extraordinarily bright future and will drive positive change in both business and public health.”
Anika Mistry (MBA ’26)
Mistry has been shaking up the entrepreneurial world since she was a teenager.
The California native admits, “I’ve spoken at global conferences before legally being allowed to rent a car!”
As founder and CEO of DevMinds, an AI-powered therapeutic platform designed to support neurodiverse students in Baltimore with personalized social-emotional learning modules, she has seen the rubber hit the road when it comes to scaling an innovative business.
During her undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins University, where she studied Computer Science and Cognitive Science, she realized that she needed more than a strong technical foundation to build her business and scale it responsibly and sustainably.
“As a founder at the intersection of AI and behavioral health, I needed to understand not only product design, but also reimbursement realities, regulatory risk, and how organizations actually make decisions,” she said. “Carey strengthened my ability to build technology that can operate within a healthcare system that demands both clinical rigor and human impact.”
Through Hopkins’ Pava Marie LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship and Maryland’s state-backed Baltimore Innovation Initiative, Mistry secured over $60,000 in initial non-dilutive funding, enabling product development, pilot partnerships, and clinical validation. Today, DevMinds is embedded within Baltimore’s healthcare and education ecosystem, supported by clinicians and community stakeholders.
Mistry said, “What makes this achievement meaningful is not simply launching a startup but learning how to translate empathy into something tangible. Building technology is one challenge; building something that can endure within reimbursement structures, regulatory frameworks, and community systems is another. Scaling DevMinds taught me that innovation does not begin with code. It begins where empathy meets action.”
