Maya Shankar, Ph.D., serves as Senior Advisor for the Social and Behavioral Sciences at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In 2014, she created the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST) – a cross-agency group of experts in applied behavioral science that translates findings and methods from the social and behavioral sciences 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. Maya 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. She is a former graduate of the Juilliard School of Music pre-college division and a private violin student of Itzhak Perlman.
