Tara Thiagarajan is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Sapien Labs, where she brings together diverse disciplines and perspectives to develop a deeper understanding of the brain and mind and their implications for individual and societal health and wellbeing. Her work takes a complex systems perspective, examining how the interaction between biology, environment and society shapes brain and mental health.
Before founding Sapien Labs, she led Madura Microfinance from its inception until March 2021, building it into an organisation with 3,000 employees serving more than 25,000 villages and small towns across India and providing small loans to over a million people each year. At Madura, she pioneered data and analytical frameworks to generate insights into economic outcomes in data-scarce environments and gained extensive experience in building organisations that work across diverse socioeconomic and technological contexts.
Her scientific and professional experience spans neuroscience, mathematics, business and scientific planning. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the Section on Critical Brain Dynamics, a Visiting Scientist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in India, and worked in Strategic Scientific Planning at Bristol Myers Squibb. She holds a PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University, a BA in Mathematics from Brandeis University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.