Founder and Executive Director
Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation
Palo Alto, California
Dr. Nina Vasan is a psychiatrist, entrepreneur and pioneer in digital mental health innovation with lived experience of anxiety and depression. She is a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford, where she is founder and executive director of Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation, the first academic laboratory dedicated to transforming mental health at scale through tech-enabled products. Brainstorm’s experts worked with Pinterest to design the “compassionate search” experience, which provides treatments for anxiety, depression and self-harm for Pinterest's 350 million users. It reduced self-harm content by 88% and was named by Fast Company as the “Most Innovative Wellness Projects” and “Best Designs for Social Good” for 2020.
At Stanford, Dr. Vasan created and teaches Designing for the 2 Billion: Leading Innovation in Mental Healthcare, the first U.S. university course on mental health innovation, and Mental Health Innovation Studio: Entrepreneurship, Technology and Policy. This led to her current role as chief medical officer of Real, a new startup founded by her former Stanford student and launched during COVID-19, providing a digital suite of mental health services for less than $1/day.
She is an active leader in the American Psychiatric Association (APA) as chair of the Committee on Innovation, leading the organization’s national innovation agenda, co- and head of the new Caucus on Psychiatric Leadership and Entrepreneurship. She is also founder of the APA Psychiatry Innovation Lab, an annual digital health incubator program that has nurtured 60-plus seed and early-stage technology companies.
Her policy experience includes serving on the Health Policy Advisory Committee for both the Obama 2008 and Biden 2020 presidential campaigns, being an expert advisor for the United Nations on inclusive social policies for mental health and working in the Office of Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan at the World Health Organization. Her business experience includes management consulting at McKinsey & Company advising health care payers and providers and co-founding a startup for helping women struggling with opioid and alcohol addiction, as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the venture capital firm, Venrock. She co-authored the No. 1 Amazon Bestselling book "Do Good Well: Your Guide to Leadership, Action, and Social Innovation," praised by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus as "the primer for social innovation." She has also appeared in media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Politico, Forbes and Vogue as well as podcasts like Armchair Expert and GOOP with Gywneth Paltrow.
Growing up in West Virginia, Dr. Vasan was an active civic entrepreneur, public health activist and scientist. She majored in government at Harvard, graduating as one of Glamour Magazine's Top 10 College Women, and received a doctor of medicine from Harvard Medical School, where she was voted as a commencement speaker. Dr. Vasan graduated from Stanford's Adult Psychiatry Residency Training Program, where she was a chief resident and received a master’s in business administration from Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Connect with her @NinaVasan on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.
Wednesday, May 3, 2023
9:00 AM – 10:00 AM
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