maya shankar

Maya Shankar is the head of Behavioral Insights at Google. Previously, she served as a senior advisor in the Obama White House for four years, where she founded and served as chair of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST), a team of scientists charged with improving public policy using research insights about human behavior. In response to SBST’s impact, President Obama signed Executive Order 13707, “Using Behavioral Science Insights to Better Serve the American People,” which institutionalized SBST and codified the practice of applying behavioral science insights to federal policy. In 2016, Maya was asked to serve as the first behavioral science advisor to the United Nations. Previously, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford. Maya holds a PhD from Oxford, earned while on a Rhodes Scholarship, and a BA from Yale in cognitive science. She is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music precollege division and a former private violin student of Itzhak Perlman.