Darshana Narayanan is a scientist, writer, and technologist. She has a Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience from Princeton University and an MFA in narrative nonfiction from NYU. As a neuroscientist, she did ultrasounds on pregnant monkeys to study fetal sensory-motor development. She now writes about the hidden lives of fetuses—and how they can be changed by war, poverty, pollution, climate change, technologies like the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool, and, potentially, space travel. She has been a producer of The Big Ideas series at The World Science Festival.
Narayanan is a founding member of The Computational Democracy Project, the nonprofit that governs Polis—an open-source tool that helps large groups find common ground on complex issues. Governments, journalists, and pro-democracy movements worldwide use Polis. It is part of the democratic infrastructure of Taiwan, the U.K., and Finland. It has also been used by the governments of Singapore and Canada, the cities of Amsterdam and Bowling Green, Kentucky, the Climate Council of Vienna, the UN Development Programme (in Bhutan, Pakistan, and Timor-Leste), and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.