Tara Thiagarajan, Ph.D.
Founder and Chief Scientist
Tara founded Sapien Labs as a way to bring together diverse disciplines and domains to build deep, holistic and global understanding of our evolving brain and mind that can impact our individual and societal health and wellbeing in practical and positive ways.
Over the last decades she has looked for insights into the nature of brain and mind across species and from multiple perspectives. From this multifaceted view she takes a complex systems perspective and is guided by two overarching insights: that the integrated system is far more than the sum of its parts, and that our changing environment is driving an evolving divergence of brain physiology among us with health and societal consequences that are more profound than we have appreciated.
Until March 2021, Tara also led Madura Microfinance building it from its founding into an organization with 3,000 people reaching into over 25,000 villages and small towns across India to provide small loans to over a million people each year. At Madura she pioneered data and analytical frameworks to enable insights into economic outcomes in these data dark ecosystems, and lived the unique challenges of building an organization that integrates across the full breadth of humanity from the very poorest, least educated and off-grid to the wealthy, educated and technology savvy. Altogether this has contributed to a global approach to science that is grounded in real-world challenges and implementation.
Tara 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. Previously she was also a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the Section on Critical Brain Dynamics, a Visiting Scientist at the National Center for Biological Sciences in India and has worked in Strategic Scientific Planning at Bristol Myers-Squibb.
“I’ve explored the nature of brain and mind from so many perspectives over the last decades – from the molecular and cellular physiology of neurons, electrode arrays implanted in monkey brains and EEG signals in humans, to the behavior of human systems from small informal rural economies to the building and managing of teams and organizations. And of course, observing the nature and meanderings of my own mind and relationship to the world. Across all of this the quest has always been for an overarching framework to understand the place of the brain and mind in the creation of the world in a way that integrates across all of its diverse outcomes. As I see it, Sapien Labs is an adventure in understanding, but also an important practical effort to help us guide our individual and collective human journey.”