Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist and creator of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans, previously named “Best Show of the Year” by Apple. She served as a senior policy advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and chaired the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. She was also appointed as the first behavioral science advisor to the United Nations. Maya has a BA from Yale and a PhD from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford. She has been profiled by The New Yorker, has been a guest on NPR, CBS Mornings, and Today, and was featured as a neuroscience expert on National Geographic’s Limitless with Chris Hemsworth. She is a former violin student of Itzhak Perlman at Juilliard. Maya lives with her husband in California.
