Dr. Tara Thiagarajan is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Sapien Labs, a nonprofit building scalable, agile infrastructure to track global trends in real-time, uncover the root causes of the deteriorating mind health of each younger generation and rapidly translate insights to real-world impact.   

Its programs to understand the impact of the chemical, technological and social environments on brain and mind include the Global Mind Project, the world’s largest ongoing study of comprehensive mind health profiles, lifestyle, and life context factors as well as Centers for Brain and Mind presently in India and Tanzania that combine physiological measurement of brain physiology and body biochemistry alongside mental assessments and survey.  The Global Mind Project consists of a growing database of over 2 million profiles across 85+ countries in 23 languages, providing deep insights into the cultural and environmental factors that are driving the decline while the field programs are rapidly building the largest biomonitoring databases in the world.   

Previously Dr. Thiagarajan was Founder and Chairman of Madura Microfinance, a company that provides microloans small-scale entrepreneurs across India which she grew to a staff of 3000 people serving millions of customers across rural India.  She has also founded or managed several other companies and worked as an academic neuroscientist.   

Dr. Thiagarajan has a broad interdisciplinary background spanning entrepreneurship, mathematics, neuroscience, and complex systems.  She has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford University, a B.A. in Mathematics from Brandeis University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.