Maya Shankar

Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist and the host and executive producer of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans.

Career

Podcast: A Slight Change of Plans A Slight Change of Plans was first published in 2021 by Pushkin Industries, the media company co-founded by Malcolm Gladwell and Jakob Weisberg. In 2023, it won the Ambie Award for Best Personal Growth Podcast. In 2022, Shankar earned a Webby nomination for Best Podcast Host.

Career in behavioral science Shankar served as a senior advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, which was formalized by Executive Order 13707 in 2015. Her work at the White House was profiled by The New Yorker in 2017.

Shankar also served as the first Behavioral Science Advisor to the United Nations. She is a Director at Google.

Early career as a musician Shankar is a graduate of the pre-college program at the Juilliard School, where she was a private violin student of Itzhak Perlman. When she was a teenager, she injured a tendon in her left hand, bringing her musical career to an end.

Education Shankar earned her B.A. from Yale University in cognitive science and went on to earn her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. In 2013, Shankar completed her postdoctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford University. She attended high school at the Juilliard School PreCollege program. In her Meditative Story, The Joy of Being An Unwilling Traveler Through Life, she describes her father's influence on her and the insights he shared to ease her lifelong anxiety. Her mother is Uma Shankar, an International Scholar Adviser at Yale University. In a graduation speech Maya gave at The Juilliard School, she explains the role her mother played in her violin journey, and the lesson of "imaginative courage" her mom taught her.