Darshana Narayanan is a scientist, journalist, and technologist. She has a Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience from Princeton University and an MFA in narrative nonfiction from NYU. She has an unusual expertise for a neuroscientist: she did ultrasounds on pregnant monkeys to study fetal sensory-motor development. As a journalist, she writes about the hidden lives of fetuses and how human fetuses can be altered by war, poverty, pollution, climate change, technologies like the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool, and, in the future, space travel. She has been a producer of The Big Ideas series for The World Science Festival.

Narayanan is a founding member of The Computational Democracy Project, the non-profit that governs Polis—an open-source, bridging-based algorithm that crowdsources public opinion on policy issues and surfaces perspectives that bridge divides. Polis is used by governments, journalists, and pro-democracy movements to strengthen democratic processes and institutions worldwide. It is part of the national infrastructure of Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and Finland. Polis has been used by the governments of Singapore, Canada, Amsterdam, the Climate Council of Vienna, and the United Nations Development Programme in Bhutan, Pakistan, and Timor-Leste. She is currently working on a project with the city of Bowling Green and Warren County, Kentucky, in collaboration with Google Jigsaw and DeepMind.