Maya Shankar | |
---|---|
Senior Advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy [1] | |
In office April 2013 –January 19, 2017 | |
President | Barack Obama |
Chair of Social and Behavioral Sciences Team [1] | |
In office September 2015 –January 19,2017 | |
First Behavioral Science Advisor to the United Nations | |
In office January 2016 –October 2016 [2] | |
President | Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon |
Personal details | |
Spouse | Jimmy Li |
Alma mater | B.A. Yale Ph.D. Oxford postdoctoral fellowship Stanford |
Website | mayashankar |
Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist and the host and executive producer of the podcast,A Slight Change of Plans. [3]
A Slight Change of Plans was first published in 2021 by Pushkin Industries,the media company co-founded by Malcolm Gladwell and Jakob Weisberg. [3]
A Slight Change of Plans explores what happens after a person experiences a life-changing event. It’s inspired by Shankar’s experience as a young classical violinist,training at Juilliard,whose career was cut short by an injury. “My whole childhood revolved around the violin,but that changed in a moment when I injured my hand playing a single note,”said Shankar. “I was forced to try and figure out who I was,and who I could be,without it.” [4]
On the show,Shankar interviews people who have lived through different kinds of big changes —accidents,deaths,kidnappings —to understand how they navigated the waters ahead. The show emphasizes the universality of human psychology to help listeners feel less alone with their own choices. Shankar explains:“Cognitive science teaches us that the strategies we use to navigate those changes can be quite similar. Which is heartening to realize!” [4]
A Slight Change of Plans was named the Apple Podcast of the Year in 2021. [4] In 2023,it won the Ambie Award for Best Personal Growth Podcast. [5] In 2022,Shankar earned a Webby nomination for Best Podcast Host. [6]
Shankar served as a senior advisor in the Obama White House,where she founded the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, [7] which was formalized by Executive Order 13707 in 2015. [8] Her work at the White House was profiled by The New Yorker in 2017. [9]
Shankar also served as the first Behavioral Science Advisor to the United Nations. [10] She is a Director at Google. [11]
Shankar is a graduate of the pre-college program at the Juilliard School,where she was a private violin student of Itzhak Perlman. [12] When she was a teenager,she injured a tendon in her left hand,bringing her musical career to an end. [13] [14]
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. [15] She attended high school at the Juilliard School PreCollege program. [12]
Maya Shankar is the daughter of Ramamurti Shankar,Indian theoretical particle physicist and a professor at Yale University. [16] 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. [17]
Part of a series on |
Nudge theory |
---|
Nicole Lapin is an American television news anchor, author and businesswoman. She is known for being an American news anchor on CNBC, CNN and Bloomberg. Lapin also served as a finance correspondent for Morning Joe on MSNBC and The Today Show on NBC. She is The New York Times bestselling author of Rich Bitch, Boss Bitch and Becoming Super Woman. Her debut title, Rich Bitch was featured in The New York Times Best Seller list under the "Advice, How-To" section.
Stephanie Rose WittelsWachs is an American voice actress, activist, and author. She is the co-founder and executive director of the theatre company Rec Room Arts in Houston, Texas and the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of the podcast network Lemonada Media. Wachs serves as the host of the podcast Last Day.
June Cohen is an American producer and entrepreneur. She is the CEO of WaitWhat, a media company she co-founded with Deron Triff. WaitWhat creates the podcasts Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman, Should This Exist?, Meditative Story, and Spark & Fire. Cohen was also host of the podcast Sincerely X in its first season. Until December 2015, she was the Executive Producer of TED Media for TED. She led the effort to bring the conference online, launching the podcast series TEDTalks in 2006, the redesigned TED.com in 2007, the TED Open Translation Project in 2009, the TED Open TV Project in 2010 and TED Conversations in 2011. Cohen joined the TED staff in 2005. She also produced TED's year-round salons, edited the TED Blog, and co-curated and co-hosted the annual conference in Long Beach, with TED curator Chris Anderson. She lives in New York City.
Alison Ann "Alie" Ward is an American writer, actress, and television and podcast host. Born in California, Ward graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a degree in cinema. In 2016, she won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing Special Class for the CBS series Innovation Nation. In 2022, the iHeartRadio Podcast Awards named her podcast Ologies “Best Science Podcast”, and the Webby Awards honored Ward as “Best Podcast Host.”
Alice Esme Levine is an English radio and television presenter and narrator.
Maya Ray Thurman Hawke is an American actress and singer-songwriter. She is the daughter of Hollywood actors Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. She began her career in modeling, and subsequently made her screen debut as Jo March in the 2017 BBC adaptation of Little Women.
Laurie Renee Santos is an American cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Yale University. She is the director of Yale's Comparative Cognition Laboratory, Director of Yale's Canine Cognition Lab, and former Head of Yale's Silliman College. She has been a featured TED speaker and has been listed in Popular Science as one of their "Brilliant Ten" young scientists in 2007 as well as in Time magazine as a "Leading Campus Celebrity" in 2013.
Shankar Vedantam is an American journalist, writer, and science correspondent. His reporting focuses on human behavior and the social sciences. He is best known for his Hidden Brain family of products: book, podcast, and radio program.
Code Switch is a podcast from National Public Radio (NPR), and an online outlet covering race and culture. Code Switch began in 2013 as a blog, and a series of stories contributed to NPR radio programs.
Shereen Marisol Meraji is an American journalist, podcaster and educator. She is an assistant professor of race in journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and is an alum of the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. She was the founding co-host and senior producer of Code Switch, a critically acclaimed podcast covering race, culture and identity, one of NPR's highest charting podcasts in 2020.
TED Radio Hour is a weekly, hour-long radio program and podcast, produced as a co-production between TED (conference) and National Public Radio. It is broadcast on 600+ public radio stations in the United States and internationally, and is also available as a free weekly podcast. The first episode aired on April 27, 2012, with host Alison Stewart. Beginning with Season 2, the series was hosted by Guy Raz. In November 2019, Manoush Zomorodi was named the show’s new host.
Meditative Story is a podcast that combines first-person storytelling, mindfulness prompts and original cinematic music, to create a unique listening experience. It is owned and produced by WaitWhat, the media company founded and led by former TED executives, Deron Triff and June Cohen. The first three seasons were created in partnership with Thrive Global, a behavior change technology company led by Arianna Huffington and Dan Katz. Variety describes Meditative Story as “part first-person narrative podcast and part guided meditation.” The podcast is hosted by Rohan Gunatillake and has featured guests such as On Being’s Krista Tippett, A Slight Change of Plans’ Maya Shankar, travel writer Pico Iyer, Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter Jason Mraz, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, journalist and amateur boxer Thomas Page McBee, award-winning writer Isabel Allende, comedian Tig Notaro, Grammy award-winning composer and musician Terence Blanchard, actor Randall Park, musician and Leinster Rugby player Niall Breslin, NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller, Peloton exercise instructor Robin Arzón, and MOMA curator Paola Antonelli, among others.
Laci Risë Mosley is an American actress, comedian and podcaster. She performs improv comedy at UCB Los Angeles and co-starred in the Pop comedy series Florida Girls. Mosley is best known for her podcast Scam Goddess, which focuses on historical and contemporary scams and cons. In 2021, Mosley joined the cast of HBO's A Black Lady Sketch Show and the iCarly revival series.
Throughline is a historical podcast and radio program from American public radio network NPR. The podcast aims to contextualize current events by exploring the historical events that contributed to them. Its episodes have outlined the history of modern political debates, civil rights issues, and domestic and international policy. The show is NPR's first history podcast.
Hidden Brain is a science podcast hosted by Shankar Vedantam.
Nicholas Quah is a journalist for Vulture and is the creator of the Nieman Lab newsletter Hot Pod News.
DISGRACELAND is an American true crime music podcast written and hosted by Jake Brennan. It is produced by Double Elvis Productions. The podcast was adapted into a book written by Brennan entitled "DISGRACELAND: Musicians Getting Away with Murder and Behaving Very Badly" published by Grand Central Publishing in 2019.
Lemonada Media is an American podcast network. The company was founded in 2019 by Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Wittels Wachs. In 2019, Lemonada Media debuted their first podcast, Last Day, offering a personal view on the opioid crisis in the U.S. (Kramer and Wachs both had younger brothers who died from an accidental opioid overdose.
Wiser Than Me is a podcast hosted by actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus. On the show, launched in 2023, Louis-Dreyfus interviews women older than her on their lived experience and earned wisdom. The show was named Apple's Best Podcast of the Year for 2023. Wiser Than Me is produced by Lemonada Media, a podcast company cofounded by Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Wittels Wachs.
Jessica Cordova Kramer is an American media producer and entrepreneur. She is CEO the podcast company Lemonada Media, which she cofounded with Stephanie Wittels Wachs. Kramer is also executive producer for many of Lemonada's podcasts, including Last Day, Everything Happens with Kate Bowler, and Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Kramer was also the founding executive producer of the podcast Pod Save the People, from Crooked Media.