White House Author

Maya Shankar, Ph.D., serves as a Senior Advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She founded and is now Chair of the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST) – a cross-agency group of applied behavioral scientists that translates findings from behavioral science into improvements in Federal programs and policies for the benefit of the American people. Building on SBST’s first year of work, in 2015 President Obama signed Executive Order 13707 entitled “Using Behavioral Science Insights to Better Serve the American People” that institutionalizes SBST and codifies 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. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford, after receiving a Ph.D. from Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and a B.A. from Yale in cognitive science. Maya is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music pre-college division and a former private violin student of Itzhak Perlman.