Shankar Vedantam Keynote Speaker

Shankar Vedantam is widely regarded as one of the best social science journalists in America.

Fascinated by the darkest corners of our human minds and the secrets it keeps from us, he studies the latest discoveries in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioural science to better understand the paradoxes of human behaviour.

Based in Washington D.C., Vedantam was a science correspondent for National Public Radio, where he now hosts the ‘Hidden Brain’ podcast, a brainchild of his New York Times bestseller. The book written in 2010 was critically acclaimed for its explorations of the human mind and the interesting and unusual ways it affects the way we think about ordinary and world events.

The Hidden Brain podcast aims to uncover the unconscious patterns that drive human behaviour and help people understand themselves better. Thought-provoking and highly entertaining, the show is aired on nearly 400 public radio stations in the U.S and downloaded more than three million times per week. It has received the Edward R Murrow Award and numerous honours from various science journals and organisations including the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Armed with more than a decade of experience in journalism, Shankar Vedantam was formerly a national correspondent and columnist for the Washington Post, and a 2010 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Apart from ‘The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives’, Vedantam co-authored ‘Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain’ with Bill Mesler in 2021. He also wrote ‘The Ghosts of Kashmir’ an emotional collection of short stories inspired by the Kargil War.

Eloquent and witty, Vedantam is highly sought-after internationally for topics on driving change, understanding unconscious biasness, the risk of fear and the science of excellence. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from Stanford University and was a Templeton-Cambridge Fellow on Science and Religion (2005), World Health Organisation Journalism Fellow (2003-2004) and the Rosalyn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow (2002-2003).