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Nina Vasan            

Founder & Executive Director at Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation at Stanford University

Dr. Nina Vasan is a psychiatrist, entrepreneur, and pioneer in digital mental health innovation. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford, where she is the founder and Executive Director of Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation.

Brainstorm is the world's first academic laboratory dedicated to the rigorous, academic study of what makes mental health products effective; the lab seeks to understand how to systematize innovation in the mental health space in order to help entrepreneurs and clinicians provide patients and users with consistently excellent products. Brainstorm’s experts worked with Pinterest to design the “compassionate search” user experience which provides treatments for anxiety, depression, and self-harm for Pinterest's 450 million users and has been distributed to 23 countries. This work was named by Fast Company as one of the “Most Innovative Wellness Projects” and “Best Designs for Social Good.” They also created The New York Times-featured “Stanford Social Media Safety Plan,” a practical and collaborative method for users of all ages to develop healthier social media behaviors. Having spent over a decade addressing social media's positive and negative impact on mental health, Brainstorm, led by Dr. Vasan, is applying the lessons learned to make Generative AI safer and healthier for all users.

Previously Chief Medical Officer of mental health startup Real (now Zeera), Dr. Vasan has worked as a healthcare advisor to the UN, the WHO Director-General’s Office, and to two presidential campaigns. She majored in government at Harvard, graduating as one of Glamour Magazine's Top 10 College Women, and received an MD from Harvard Medical School, where she was voted by classmates as a commencement speaker. She also graduated from Stanford's Adult Psychiatry Residency Training Program, where she was a Chief Resident, and received an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business.

Dr. Vasan co-authored the #1 Amazon bestselling book "Do Good Well: Your Guide to Leadership, Action, and Social Innovation," and was named by Business Insider as one of their 30 Under 40 in Healthcare. Her thought leadership has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and more.

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