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. 

At Sapien Labs, Tara has led initiatives such as the development of the Global Mind Project, the world’s largest database of comprehensive mental health profiles. The Global Mind Project seeks to track and understand the evolving relationship between our social, technological and cultural environment and our mental wellbeing and functional capability. The Global Mind Project has uncovered critical links between modern lifestyle factors—such as early age of smartphone use and ultra-processed food consumption—and the decline in Mind Health and wellbeing.

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.