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Nina Vasan

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Dr. Nina Vasan
Personal details
Born
Nina Vasan

(1984-01-27) January 27, 1984 (age 40)
Washington, D.C., U.S.
ResidencePalo Alto, CA
Alma materHarvard University
Harvard Medical School
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Websitehttp://www.ninavasan.com

Nina Vasan (born January 27, 1984) is an American psychiatrist and author[1] of the Amazon #1 best-selling[2] book Do Good Well: Your Guide to Leadership, Action and Innovation.[3] She is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is currently the Founder and Executive Director of Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation at Stanford University.[4] She won the 2002 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.[5]

Early years

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Vasan was born in Washington, DC, spent her childhood in Vienna, West Virginia, and attended Parkersburg High School. At age 16, she started a local group in Wood County to engage teenagers in the American Cancer Society that grew into a nationwide network of teen volunteers leading efforts in education, advocacy, and service.[6] For this work, Vasan was honored as Prudential Spirit of Community Awards National Honoree,[7] an Olympic torchbearer, and a USA Today All-USA Academic First Team member.[8]

Vasan was active in the Girl Scouts since age 7 and received the highest honor in Girl Scouting, the Gold Award Young Woman of Distinction,[9] from Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in 2002.[10] She also participated in the America's Junior Miss pageant as West Virginia's Junior Miss.[11]

In 2002, Vasan won the $50,000 Intel Foundation Young Scientist award, the top Grand Prize award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, for her work with Harvard Medical School professor Jeremy Wolfe on visual learning, which she conducted at the Research Science Institute.[12] She also received the Seaborg (now Dudley Herschbach) SIYSS Award, which led to her presenting her research during the 2002 Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm.[13]

Education

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Vasan entered Harvard College and graduated with an A.B. in Government in 2006. She was named one of the "Top 10 College Women" in the US by Glamour Magazine.[14] She earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and was voted by classmates as a student commencement speaker.[15] She completed her residency training at Stanford University School of Medicine, where she was a Chief Resident in Psychiatry.[16] While in residency, she completed an MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Career

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During the 2008 Presidential Election, Vasan served as a Co-Leader of Battleground State Outreach[17] for the Obama presidential campaign's Health Policy Advisory Committee.[18] She also interned for a summer in the Office of Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan at the World Health Organization in Geneva. [citation needed]

After graduating from Harvard Medical School in 2013, she entered residency training in Psychiatry at Stanford University Hospital in Stanford, California. In 2015, Vasan launched The Psychiatry Innovation Lab[19] at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, the world's largest psychiatric organization. The PIL is an incubator that catalyzes the formation of innovative ventures to transform mental healthcare.[20] MedTech Boston named her a "40 Under 40 Healthcare Innovator" in 2016.[21]

In 2016, she launched Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation, the world's first academic laboratory dedicated to transforming mental health through technology and entrepreneurship.[16] She started the first college course on mental health entrepreneurship[22] and the first virtual reality and augmented reality innovation lab for brain and behavioral health.[23] In 2017, Vasan was named to the shortlist for the Financial Times and McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize, awarded to the best business book proposal by an author aged under 35.[24]

In 2019, Vasan and Brainstorm colleagues worked with Pinterest to launch a "Compassionate Search" feature. The new tool provides evidence-based mental health and stress relief tools to users searching for topics like "anxiety" and "stress".[25] Compassionate Search is designed to make mental health tools more accessible to users with difficulty accessing mental health services, while changing the experience of how mental health is addressed online towards a more open and honest experience free from stigma.[26] They also addressed issues of suicide, safety, and self-harm that led to changes in the Pinterest platform, including creating a set of exercises for improving user's emotional outcomes,[27] as well as AI, which Pinterest said achieved an 88% reduction in reports of self-harm content by users and ability to remove such content 3 times faster.[28] This work was named by Fast Company as one of the Best Designs for Social Good [29] and Most Innovative Wellness Projects [30] of 2020.

Book

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Vasan's experience as a young civic entrepreneur led to her co-authoring the #1 Amazon best-selling book[2] Do Good Well: Your Guide to Leadership, Action and Innovation[3] on how to maximize impact[31] in solving social problems.[32] Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus called the book "the primer for social innovation."[33]

References

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  1. ^ "First-Year Experience". lp.wileypub.com. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  2. ^ a b Vasan, Nina; Przybylo, Jennifer (2013-03-25). Do Good Well: Your Guide to Leadership, Action, and Social Innovation (1 ed.). Hoboken, N.J.; Chichester: Jossey-Bass. ISBN 9781118382943.
  3. ^ a b Przybylo, Jennifer; Vasan, Nina (2013-04-04). "Teaching Students to Do Good Well". The Huffington Post. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  4. ^ "Stanford's Brainstorm lab works with Pinterest, others to apply product design to mental health". The Stanford Daily. 2019-09-17. Retrieved 2020-01-07.
  5. ^ "Young Scientists From Around The World Receive Total Of $3 Million In Scholarships And Prizes". www.intel.com. Retrieved 2020-01-07.
  6. ^ Damon, William (2009-04-07). The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9781416537243.
  7. ^ "West Virginia's Nina Vasan of Vienna Named One of America's Top Ten Youth Volunteers; State's James Taylor of Worthington Also Honored During 4-Day Celebration With Tribute from Martin Sheen of TV's 'West Wing'. - Free Online Library". www.thefreelibrary.com. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  8. ^ "USATODAY.com - 2002 All-USA High School Academic First Team". usatoday30.usatoday.com. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  9. ^ "National Young Women of Distinction - Girl Scouts". Girl Scouts of the USA. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  10. ^ McCarroll, Christina (2002-04-03). "Scout gives back to her orphanage". Christian Science Monitor. ISSN 0882-7729. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  11. ^ "Mountain Home-Grown Beauty Queen | Magazine | The Harvard Crimson". www.thecrimson.com. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  12. ^ "Young Scientists From Around The World Receive Total Of $3 Million In Scholarships And Prizes". www.intel.com. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  13. ^ "Dudley R. Herschbach SIYSS Award Winners". Student Science. 2016-06-17. Archived from the original on 2017-02-27. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  14. ^ "The scary truth about college health clinics. Top 10 college women: 2005. The top 10 college winners 1995". www.readabstracts.com. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  15. ^ "Change in Medicine Theme for New HMS Grads | HMS". hms.harvard.edu. Archived from the original on 2017-08-03. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  16. ^ a b Lewis Strain, Aimee (2018-06-01). "Inspirational brain health expert hopes to shatter the stigma associated with mental health". Silicon Valley Business Journal. Retrieved 2020-01-06.
  17. ^ "The Petition and Selected Signatories". New Republic. 2009-02-08. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  18. ^ Pollack, Harold (2009-03-12). "Feeling Bad about Politics this Week? Check out Doctors for Obama". The Huffington Post. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  19. ^ Levin, Aaron (2016-02-12). "Resident Wants to Jump-Start Thinking on Quality Improvement". Psychiatric News. 51 (4): 1. doi:10.1176/appi.pn.2016.2b15.
  20. ^ "Psychiatry Innovation Lab nurtures young businesses". www.mdedge.com. Retrieved 2020-01-07.
  21. ^ "The 2016 MedTech Boston 40 Under 40 Healthcare Innovators". MedTech Boston. 2016-05-02. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  22. ^ "Classy Classes: PSYC 240 gets students working on mental health care". The Stanford Daily. 2017-03-27. Retrieved 2020-01-07.
  23. ^ Brennan, Dominic (2017-10-04). "Stanford Event Seeks Innovative Uses of VR for Behavioural Health". Road to VR. Retrieved 2020-01-07.
  24. ^ Hill, Andrew (2017-10-17). "Bracken Bower Prize 2017: the shortlist". The Financial Times. Retrieved 2020-01-06.
  25. ^ "Pinterest rolls out new tool aimed at helping users with anxiety, stress". MobiHealthNews. 2019-07-23. Retrieved 2020-01-07.
  26. ^ "Feeling Stressed Out? Pinterest Wants to Help". 2019-07-22. Retrieved 2019-07-22.
  27. ^ "Pinterest Has a New Plan to Address Self-Harm". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2020-01-07.
  28. ^ "Pinterest says AI reduced reported self-harm content by 88%". VentureBeat. 2019-10-10. Retrieved 2020-01-07.
  29. ^ "The best designs for social good of 2020". 30 September 2020.
  30. ^ "The most innovative wellness projects of 2020". 30 September 2020.
  31. ^ "Do Good Well". Do Good Well. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  32. ^ "Harvard grad guides entrepreneurs to 'Do Good Well'". USA TODAY College. 2013-03-29. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  33. ^ "Do Good Well: Your Guide to Leadership, Action, and Social Innovation". www.wiley.com.
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