Dr. Maya Shankar

DR. MAYA SHANKAR is currently Google’s global director of behavioral economics. Previously she served as a senior advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and served as chair of the White House’s Behavioral Science Team — a team of scientists charged with improving public policy using research insights about human behavior. In 2016, Shankar served as the first behavioral science advisor to the United Nations under Ban Ki-moon. Shankar completed a post-doctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford, after receiving a PhD from Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and a BA from Yale in cognitive science. She has been profiled by The New Yorker and has been featured in The New York Times, Scientific American, Forbes, and on NPR’s All Things Considered, Freakonomics, and Hidden Brain. Shankar is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music’s pre-college division and is a former private violin student of Itzhak Perlman.