2023: Mental wellbeing in young adults improves with older age of first smartphone ownership
2023: Multiple dimensions of mental wellbeing improve with older age of first smartphone ownership
2023: Top five mental health problems that decrease with older age of first smartphone ownership
2023: The effects of age of first smartphone ownership in the absence of life traumas or adversities
2023: Regional mental wellbeing scores by age of first smartphone ownership in 18-24 year olds
2023: Regional Social Self scores by age of first smartphone ownership in 18-24 year olds
2023: Regional ratings of mental health problems by age of first smartphone in females aged 18-24
2023: Regional ratings of mental health problems by age of first smartphone ownership in females aged 18-24
2023: Regional ratings of mental health problems by age of first smartphone ownership in males aged 18-24
2022: The mental state of the world in 2022 relative to previous years
2022: Mental wellbeing trends 2019-2022 – Average MHQ
2022: Mental wellbeing trends 2019-2022 – % Distressed or Struggling
2022: Mental wellbeing across geographic regions
2022: Mental wellbeing across language groups
2022: Percentage Distressed or Struggling across geographic regions
2022: Percentage Distressed or Struggling across language groups
2022: Mental wellbeing across countries – Average MHQ
2022: Mental wellbeing across countries – % Distressed or Struggling
2022: Globally, young adults are 3 to 4 times as likely to struggle with their mental health as their parents’ generation (Regions)
2022: Globally, young adults are 3 to 4 times as likely to struggle with their mental health as their parents’ generation (Language groups)
2022: Difference in mental health distress between older and younger generations by country
2022: Mental wellbeing across the 6 dimensions
2022: Difference in mental wellbeing between older and younger adults across the 6 dimensions – Average score
2022: Difference in mental wellbeing between older and younger adults across the 6 dimensions – % Distressed or Struggling
2022: Difference in Social Self Scores between older and younger adults – geographic regions
2022: Difference in Social Self Scores between older and younger adults – language groups
2022: Difference in % Distressed or Struggling between older and younger adults across for Social Self – geographic regions
2022: Difference in % Distressed or Struggling between older and younger adults across for Social Self – language groups
2022: Older adults are twice as likely to be close to many of their adult family members as the youngest adults
2022: Relationship with adult family impacts mental wellbeing outcomes
2022: The nature of the childhood home has changed over time – Material/Academic
2022: The nature of the childhood home has changed over time – Loving/Stable
2022: Prevalence of parent-driven traumas in childhood across age groups
2022: Difference in mental wellbeing based on childhood home and adult family relationships – average MHQ score
2022: Difference in mental wellbeing based on childhood home and adult family relationships – % Distressed or Struggling
2022: How the difference in family closeness between age groups varied across geographic regions
2022: How the difference in family closeness between age groups varied across language groups
2022: How differences in nature of childhood homes between age groups varied across geographic regions
2022: How differences in nature of childhood homes between age groups varied across language groups
2022: The distribution of the number of close friends
2022: Average number of close friends varied across age groups
2022: The changing quality of friendship as the number of close friends increases
2022: The changing quality of friendships across age groups
2022: Relationship between number of close friends and mental wellbeing
2022: Strong family relationships mean better friendships
2022: The combined impact of family relationships and friendship on mental wellbeing
2022: Relationship between mental wellbeing and productivity
2023: Prevalence of different traumas and abuse during childhood across age groups
2023: How different types of childhood trauma and abuse impact the mental wellbeing of 18-24 year olds
2023: Top mental health problems associated with childhood abuse/assault
2023: Differences in the prevalence of childhood abuse/assault in 18-24 year olds across countries
2022: Prevalence of debilitating obsessive, strange, and unwanted thoughts and guilt and blame across age groups for different countries
2022: Prevalence of different types of debilitating obsessive, strange, and unwanted thoughts across age groups
2022: Magnitude difference in prevalence of debilitating obsessive, strange, and unwanted thoughts between younger and older adults
2022: Prevalence of different types of debilitating feelings of guilt and blame across age groups
2022: Magnitude difference in prevalence of debilitating guilt and blame between younger and older adults
2022: Mental distress, feelings of aggression, and firearm deaths due to physical violence
2022: Mental wellbeing and firearm deaths due to physical violence
2022: Firearm deaths due to physical violence and feelings of aggression among males 18-24
2022: A changing pattern of mental wellbeing by age
2022: Change in mental wellbeing by age since 2019
2022: The mental health challenges experienced by over 50% of young adults aged 18-24
2022: The mental health assets diminished in over 50% of young adults aged 18-24
2022: Mental health problems that are growing in younger adults relative to older generations
2022: Capabilities and assets that are diminishing in younger adults relative to older adults
2022: Mental wellbeing scores across the 6 dimensions in 18-24 year olds
2021: Change in mental wellbeing status of the English-speaking world between 2019 and 2022
2021: Distribution of mental wellbeing status across different regions of the world
2021: Distribution of mental wellbeing status across different regions of the world
2021: Mental Wellbeing Status of internet-enabled populations in 34 countries
2021: Relationship between mental wellbeing metrics and global economic indicators
2021: Relationship between mental wellbeing metrics and cultural indicators
2021: Mental wellbeing status across age groups
2021: Mental wellbeing status across gender groups
2021: Relationship between mental wellbeing status and educational attainment
2021: Relationship between mental wellbeing status and employment status
2021: Magnitude of difference in mental wellbeing status across different demographic factors
2021: Correlation of country mental wellbeing scores with national statistics on suicide and assault
2021: Relationship of MHQ score to productivity
2021: Relationships between mental wellbeing and employment status
2021: Areas of mental wellbeing that show differences between employed and unemployed
2021: Percentage of distressed or struggling across age groups for different employment status
2021: Relationship between productivity and mental wellbeing among employed people
2021: Areas of mental wellbeing that correlate with productivity in employed people
2021: Relationship between productivity and two specific mental health symptoms
2021: Prevalence of people distressed or struggling who are not seeking help across different countries
2021: Most common reasons why people do not seek help for mental health challenges
2020: Distribution of MHQ Scores in 2020 across the English speaking population and changes relative to 2019
2020: MHQ score distributions across the six functional dimensions of mental wellbeing and changes relative to 2019
2020: Average MHQ score by country for 2020 and change from 2019
2020: Differences across countries for the 6 dimensions of mental wellbeing
2020: Top 3 mental health problems and assets across countries benchmarked to the USA
2020: Mental wellbeing of people living in cities relative to the rest of the country
2020: Percentage Distressed or Struggling across countries
2020: Psychiatrists per 10,000 correlates with percentage seeking help across countries
2020: Percentage Distressed who are seeking professional or medical help across countries
2020: Clinical burden of countries was unrelated to psychiatry resources
2020: Mental wellbeing is progressively worse for each younger generation.
2020: Mental wellbeing was worse in younger adults across all dimensions of mental wellbeing
2020: Key area of mental wellbeing that show differences between age groups
2020: Difference in mental wellbeing by gender
2020: MHQ scores for each gender group across each dimension of mental wellbeing
2020: Size of male-female gap in mental wellbeing across age groups
2020: Size of male-female gap in mental wellbeing across countries
2020: Relationship between sleep, socializing, exercise and mental wellbeing
2020: Impact of sleep, socializing and exercise on different dimensions of mental wellbeing
2020: Prevalence of getting a good nights sleep, socializing and exercising across countries
2020: Prevalence of getting a good nights sleep, socializing and exercising across gender groups
2020: Prevalence of getting a good nights sleep, socializing and exercising across age groups
2020: Impact of various health, financial, and social challenges due to Covid-19 on mental wellbeing
2020: Prevalence of health, financial, and social impacts due to Covid-19 across countries
2020: Impact of various health, financial, and social challenges due to Covid-19 on the mental wellbeing of younger and older adults
2020: Impact of cumulative trauma and adversity on mental wellbeing
Randy Winn
Board Member
As a Board Member at Sapien Labs Randall Winn brings a perspective on building data and analytics organizations across a wide range of end markets, including healthcare. Randall is the co-founder and Managing Partner at 22C, a private investment firm delivering equity capital, strategic guidance, tactical mentorship and targeted operational resources to data/information and business services companies. 22C’s operational and technology resources, including a 100+ person affiliated data science organization, deliver practical, real-world support to 22C’s management team and partners in their efforts to build companies that are leaders in their respective markets.
Randy was co-founder and long-time CEO of Capital IQ. He is a current board member of ZoomInfo, Aurora Energy Research, LMI, and Canoe Software. He was the former Chairman of Dealogic and was a former board member of Definitive Healthcare, Viteos Fund Services and Merit Software. Randy received his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University.
As a father of three kids, I have been deeply concerned by the degradation in mental health over the past years, particularly among teens. I had developed a series of hypotheses about the causes and the extent of the problems, but was lacking data to really understand it. Given my background and “day job” of building data and analytics businesses, the lack of data was deeply unsatisfying. After meeting Tara and team and seeing the work they have done, I wanted to join the effort to shine a light on the causes of this issue and bring my experience to try to make an impact.
Rahul Varma
Board Member
Rahul is a global Human Resources leader, speaker and thought leader whose career has been dedicated to helping people thrive at work and make a positive impact on businesses and society. He has led large, globally distributed workforces and complex organizational transformations. Most recently, Rahul was the Chief Talent Officer for Accenture Technology, leading HR for Accenture’s largest business that employs over 375,000 people. From India to Singapore to New York he has previously held various roles at Accenture including Global Head of Talent, Chief Learning Officer, Global Head of HR Strategy and Head of HR, India. During this journey, he crafted a new approach to leadership development, implemented an AI based solution to measuring skills, helped launch and integrate Accenture’s platform business, led the largest scale successful re-imagination of performance management in the world and created multiple innovations in digital learning and global learning centers. As the first HR Director in India, Rahul led through a phase of dramatic growth as Accenture grew from 200 people to almost 40,000 in seven years, now a Harvard Business School case study on hyper-growth in India. Rahul has also been a two-time recipient of the First-Place CLO Learning Elite Award.
Rahul has served on the boards of Covenant House International, a non-profit dedicated to eradicating youth homelessness and Madura Microfinance, which provided microloans across rural India.
Rahul holds a master’s degree in Human Resources from Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (Pune, India) and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from University of Delhi.
I have come to realize that we need to evolve our current systems and structures, within organizations and more broadly in society, for people to lead lives that are physically healthy, intellectually energizing, emotionally fulfilling, and fundamentally aligned to their individual purpose. I seek to create solutions for better ways to work and live by fusing the latest understanding from modern science with enduring wisdom. Sapien Labs is doing profoundly important work in bringing the richest and most comprehensive data to inform the state of human wellbeing around the world and its drivers that I believe can provide direction in fulfilling this goal.
Robert Carter
Acting Executive Director and Board Member
As a Board Member at Sapien Labs Rob brings a perspective on team building and strategies to integrate research into consumer and healthcare products.
Rob is a senior executive at Avalere Health with deep healthcare relationships and a broad understanding of the behavioral health space including expert understanding of the models used by large companies and payers to address behavioral health. He has advised large private equity investors in the diligence and purchase of companies delivering substance abuse treatment; outpatient psychiatry, autism services and running inpatient care for eating and other disorders. Rob also has significant experience developing successful business models and acquiring early customers and partnerships for early-stage data/tech driven companies.
Rob has a Masters in Public and Private Management from the Yale University School of Management and a BA in Economics from Bucknell University.
As human beings we all struggle through our lifetimes to understand the elements that shape our mental trajectories and drive our emotions and decisions. Being part of Sapien Labs is, in this sense, a personal journey that has brought, and continues to bring, new perspectives to this understanding. What also captures my imagination though is the possibility of turning these insights and ideas into something real that can integrate tangibly into the world at scale to help millions of people better navigate their mental challenges. What are the mechanisms to get us there faster? What are models that can work? Solving these challenges in the context of a smart, committed team is what I find most interesting and rewarding.
Uttara Bharath
Senior Technical Advisor for Social and Behavior Change, Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs
Uttara brings a global public health perspective to Sapien Labs, particularly with respect to practical ways to deliver research insights in cognitive and mental health as effective public health communication.
For the last two decades, as part of the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs Uttara has lived and worked across Africa and Asia focused on the design and implementation of various public health communication programs addressing the behavioral, social and normative aspects of a range of health issues including HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases, Maternal and Child Health, Suicide Prevention, Child Abuse, Early Childhood Development and more recently COVID-19. She is also the founder of Nalamdana, a non-profit for health communication in India, which she founded in 1993 as an echoing green fellow. She continues to serve on Nalamdana’s Board of Trustees providing technical guidance to its projects, research, and planning, as well as training and workshops.
Uttara holds an MPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a BA in English from Wellesley College.
“Given my area of expertise in behavioural science, I am particularly interested in the social determinants of cognitive development – the enablers, inhibitors and barriers. Understanding these better will go a long way in strengthening caregiving and education strategies in early childhood, childhood and adolescence.”
Grigorij Richters
Communications and Partnerships
Grig works with Sapien Labs as a core part of its team on crafting its communication and outreach and enabling strategic partnerships across relevant stakeholders.
Grigis a filmmaker, PR and digital media strategist with a particular interest in communication that can make the world a better place. He has worked as a director and producer and was previously Kevin Spacey’s filmmaker in residence at the Old-Vic Theatre and activist Stephen Sutton’s documentarian. He also co-founded Asteroid Day with astrophysicist and Queen guitarist Brian May, playing a key role in bringing together stakeholders and outreach to garner broad global awareness. He is also an ardent activist and has organized numerous advocacy events. In 2018 he walked from Paris to Berlin, making over one Million steps, to raise awareness about 1,000 unaccompanied refugee children in Greece that ended in the German government agreeing to find a solution for the children.
I’m passionate about mental health issues from having lost friends to suicide in the past. I’m also passionate about connecting the public to the potential of science. Bringing together stakeholders to shed greater light on mental health issues through science and stories at Sapien Labs is challenging yet so fulfilling.
Callyn Giese
Senior Manager, Marketing and Events
Callyn joined Sapien Labs in 2019 and manages marketing and events, including coordination of all virtual symposia which she has helped design and launch. She also supports the marketing outreach of the WorkforceMHQ product.
She has over 10 years of experience working in marketing and events and previously managed large trade shows and hosted events, including all aspects of event strategy, planning, execution, marketing and communication. One of her proudest achievements was the creation of a “Women in Analytics” panel at the annual client conference in her previous role at Applied Predictive Technologies, a Mastercard Company.
Callyn has an M.A. in English from George Mason University and a B.A. in English from James Madison University.
It is an honor to be part of an organization that has amazing ambitions – improving mental health on a global scale. It’s rewarding to be able to use marketing and events skills honed in the corporate world to support that mission. I’m also grateful to be part of a team that blends an academic background in neuroscience with an entrepreneurial spirit in a really cool and unique way.
Maya Thiagarajan
Founder and Education Director, TREE
Maya brings to Sapien Labs a perspective on ways to integrate research insights into curriculum and policy in education for better learning and wellbeing.
Maya is currently the Founder and Education Director of TREE, an organization that develops, supports, and inspires teachers in India. She has previously taught in a wide range of high schools including public school in New Hampshire and inner-city Baltimore as part of Teach for America, and in private schools in New York City, Boston and most recently at UWC Singapore. She now serves on the Board of the Kodaikanal International School. She is the author of Beyond the Tiger Mom: East-West Parenting for the Global Age, and writes widely on parenting and education.
Maya has an MA in Education Policy from Harvard University and a BA in English from Middlebury College.
As an educator, I am fascinated by the differences in how people learn and navigate the world and how this is influenced by culture, methods of teaching and life experiences. Sapien Labs’ research in the area of mental and cognitive health brings new perspectives and understanding to this and can have far-reaching implications for educators and education systems across the globe.
Finding ways to enable better adolescent mental health and cognitive health in low-income communities for greater school success are also both particularly important challenges that I am excited to contribute to.
Jennifer Newson, Ph.D.
Lead Scientist, Cognitive and Mental Health
Jennifer came to Sapien Labs out of a curiosity for the workings of the human mind and a desire to blend academic research with real world impact. At Sapien Labs she has spearheaded the development of the MHQ and the global roll-out of the Mental Health Million Project and continues to lead data exploration and the development of novel tools.
Her previous research has spanned multiple subfields of the brain including cognitive neuroscience, olfaction science, and mental health and wellbeing where she has worked on the relationship between attention and memory, scene reconstruction in memory and imagination using fMRI, and the translation of olfaction induced insights using EEG and measures of emotional, physical and mental wellbeing into product design. Prior to Sapien Labs she was Head of Neuroscience Research at Givaudan and brings a broad perspective across academic, commercial and not-for profit organizations.
She has a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Oxford University and a B.Sc. Hons in Neuroscience from the University of Edinburgh. She did her postdoctoral work at the Wellcome Center for Neuroimaging at the University College London.
“I’m interested in how scientific insights can be translated into tangible applications that have real-life benefit, and the opportunity to shape the future of brain health and mental health care, ultimately enabling people to receive care and support that is more tailored to their needs.
I love the “anything’s possible” perspective at Sapien Labs which helps us to navigate ambitious initiatives/projects and to seek solutions and opportunities that go beyond the status quo. I am also excited to be able to bring together my background across neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience and my experience in translating fundamental science into technologies in the commercial sector to build something useful for the field of mental health care.”
Joseph Taylor
Head of Digital Marketing
Joe leads global digital outreach for Sapien Labs particularly enabling broad multi-language global outreach for the Mental Health Million Project and the MHQ products for Workforce and Universities.
Joe has broad experience in International marketing and media where he has previously led high value projects & large cross-disciplinary teams in digital marketing across multiple industries and Fortune 500 companies including Entertainment (20th Century Fox, Sony, YouTube), Technology (Google, Microsoft) and FMCG (Nestle, P&G, RB). He is certified across multiple digital marketing platforms.
He has also volunteered as a Teacher/Tutor with Breakthrough SF – a community program designed to support children from diverse and less-privileged backgrounds to have a path to a college education.
Joe has a B.A. in Law and M.Sc. in Money and Banking from the University of Birmingham, UK and a Diploma in French Law from Universite de Limoges, France.
It is highly rewarding to be working with an organization that is driving real change in our understanding of mental health and wellbeing. The Sapien Labs mission is fundamental to our collective future, and as a marketer, being able to contribute even a little is an incredible opportunity.
Having worked in marketing and communications for nearly 20 years, I’ve contributed to the growth of multiple companies, brands and products. My goal at Sapien Labs is to apply the techniques of reaching the right people with the right message, to an audience that is as large and diverse as the entire planet.
Narayan Subramaniyam, Ph.D.
Research Affiliate
Narayan’s focus at Sapien Labs is on developing novel analytical approaches to the EEG signal. He is also the primary author of the popular EEG methods articles on Lab Talk.
Narayan has a longstanding interest in complex systems, statistical signal processing, computational modeling and nonlinear time series analysis, with applications to functional neuroimaging data (EEG, MEG), including brain connectivity estimation. He has previously worked on quantifying structural properties of EEG data based on complex networks and nonlinear dynamics, with applications to derive EEG-based biomarkers for epilepsy.
Prior to his scientific study he worked as a software engineer at MindTree, India on end-to-end SAP implementations for businesses. His other interests include pedagogical tools for teachers in higher education.
Narayan has an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the Tampere University of Technology, Finland and a B.E. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the BMS College of Engineering in Bangalore, India. He is also presently a researcher at Tampere University of Technology, Finland.
“I am passionate about solving problems at the intersection of mathematics and neuroscience. At Sapien labs, I get the amazing opportunity to challenge and test the fundamental assumptions made when applying mathematical methods to analyze and interpret EEG data.”
Olesia Topalo
Manager, Data Operations and Workflow
Olesia manages all of Sapien Labs’ backend data and technology processes, workflows and QA.
She has extensive experience in the design of workflows and in QA for software products. She is a Certified Test Manager with deep knowledge of manual and automation testing of software and has served as a project manager and QA Lead on various large software development projects with high pressure delivery schedules. She has knowledge of a wide range of software, testing and tracking tools and programming languages.
Olesia also speaks a number of languages including English, German, Russian, Ukranian and Polish and is a certified German to Ukranian translator.
She has both a Bachelor and Master’s Degree in Translation (German-Ukrainian) from the Foreign Languages Department at Lviv National University of Ivan Franko in Ukraine.
I am excited about working with Sapien Labs because I believe in the goals and mission of the organization. I feel that the research and work done by Sapien Labs can impact the world and help people understand the brain and improve our mental wellbeing. I am working with data operation and management activities and it’s really fascinating how much dependency we can find between our mental wellbeing and environmental factors.
Jerzy Bala, Ph.D.
Chief Data Scientist
Jerzy has a personal interest in brain health issues and joins Sapien Labs to apply his computational expertise to enable better brain health.
He brings deep perspective to solving complex data analytics problems. His wide breadth of expertise includes artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, healthcare analytics and probabilistic modeling that he has applied across diverse domains such financial fraud prevention and detection and risk management, next product to buy predictions and sensor analytics for ballistic target discrimination. He has served as Principal Investigator for research projects under the aegis of various government agencies including Defense Research Projects Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Department of Education, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Jerzy has received ten Commonwealth of Virginia Outstanding Achievement Awards for success in the U.S. Department of Defense research projects.
He has conceived several patented machine learning algorithms, among them, distributed data and text mining methods, and a data analytics method geared towards the interactive acquisition and display of visual knowledge representations. He is also the co-author of the book, Machine Learning – A Multi strategy Approach. His postdoctoral research was sponsored through a grant from the National Science Foundation in Computational Science and Engineering to investigate a class of multi-strategy machine learning algorithms that combine explainable rule-based learning with neural networks.
He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from George Mason University, and a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland. He has held various roles in data science and analytics, most recently as Vice President, Analytics at Bottomline Technologies.
Sapien Labs is in a unique position of executing ongoing global data acquisition initiatives to builda rich and evolving collection of large-scale multidimensional data sets that include demographics with life experience, neurophysiological, and mental health information. As a data scientist, I understand the importance of such data as an asset that can fuel better understanding of the brain, leading to better tools for more accurate diagnoses and treatment of disorders.
I am most interested in solving complex knowledge and large-scale data analytics problems towards efforts to build proof-of-concept demonstrations and productization of analytical solutions.
Dhanya Parameshwaran, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist
Dhanya’s combined interest in solving socioeconomic challenges and understanding the brain led to the pioneering work behind the Human Brain Diversity Project where she continues to build deep insights into the EEG signal and its relationship to environment and human outcomes.
Dhanya has worked across various neural systems and species from rats to humans studying electrical activity of the brain from spiking activity in CA1 pyramidal neuronal networks to LFP, ECoGand EEG signals. She has a broad computational background with substantial experience in signal processing and machine learning, as well as extensive programming experience in MATLAB, R, and Python. Previously, as a Data Scientist for Madura Microfinance in India, she developed analytical models to predict the economic success of informal rural economies.
Dhanya is also co-Founder of Kabbadi Adda, an active organizer of the Kabbadi leagues in India.
Dhanya has a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras in Aerospace Engineering and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS), TIFR in India.
The more we find out about the brain, the more uncharted the science seems. Often in neuroscience, we generalize our findings to humanity as a whole based on information from a few select individuals chosen for research. I am interested in the differences across individuals as opposed to the similarities. At Sapien Labs, I get an opportunity to look at large-scale data from India, US, Sudan, Argentina and beyond. Being able to connect the evolution of the brain to the evolution of man is a question I am fascinated by.
At Sapien Labs I am involved in building tools to analyze EEG data quickly and arrive at meaningful research outcomes. Simplifying EEG analysis and being able to build EEG tools that are deployed for everyone to use on a large scale, agnostic to the question, is something I am keen to contribute”.
Tara Thiagarajan, Ph.D.
Founder and Chief Scientist
Tara founded Sapien Labs as a way to bring together diverse disciplines and domains to build deep, holistic and global understanding of our evolving brain and mind that can impact our individual and societal health and wellbeing in practical and positive ways.
Over the last decades she has looked for insights into the nature of brain and mind across species and from multiple perspectives. From this multifaceted view she takes a complex systems perspective and is guided by two overarching insights: that the integrated system is far more than the sum of its parts, and that our changing environment is driving an evolving divergence of brain physiology among us with health and societal consequences that are more profound than we have appreciated.
Until March 2021, Tara also led Madura Microfinance building it from its founding into an organization with 3,000 people reaching into over 25,000 villages and small towns across India to provide small loans to over a million people each year. At Madura she pioneered data and analytical frameworks to enable insights into economic outcomes in these data dark ecosystems, and lived the unique challenges of building an organization that integrates across the full breadth of humanity from the very poorest, least educated and off-grid to the wealthy, educated and technology savvy. Altogether this has contributed to a global approach to science that is grounded in real-world challenges and implementation.
Tara has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford University, a B.A. in Mathematics from Brandeis University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Previously she was also a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the Section on Critical Brain Dynamics, a Visiting Scientist at the National Center for Biological Sciences in India and has worked in Strategic Scientific Planning at Bristol Myers-Squibb.
“I’ve explored the nature of brain and mind from so many perspectives over the last decades – from the molecular and cellular physiology of neurons, electrode arrays implanted in monkey brains and EEG signals in humans, to the behavior of human systems from small informal rural economies to the building and managing of teams and organizations. And of course, observing the nature and meanderings of my own mind and relationship to the world. Across all of this the quest has always been for an overarching framework to understand the place of the brain and mind in the creation of the world in a way that integrates across all of its diverse outcomes.
As I see it, Sapien Labs is an adventure in understanding, but also an important practical effort to help us guide our individual and collective human journey.”
