Shankar Vedantam is a well-known American journalist, writer, and science correspondent, recognized as a leading social science journalist in the U.S. He earned an undergraduate degree in electronics engineering and later obtained a master’s degree in journalism from Stanford University. Vedantam started his journalism career through various fellowships, including the Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship and the World Health Organization Journalism Fellowship. He worked at The Washington Post from 2001 to 2011, where he wrote the "Department of Human Behavior" column and contributed to Slate with his "Hidden Brain" column. In 2011, he joined NPR and launched the "Hidden Brain" podcast, which explores the unconscious patterns that influence human behavior. The podcast has over two million downloads weekly and is aired on nearly 400 public radio stations across the U.S. As an author, Vedantam has written two New York Times bestsellers: "The Hidden Brain" and "Useful Delusions," co-authored with Bill Mesler. He also published a collection of short stories titled "The Ghosts of Kashmir," which examines the divide between Indians and Pakistanis. His work has received numerous awards, including the Edward R. Murrow Award for the "Hidden Brain" podcast. Vedantam is a popular speaker on topics like unconscious bias and the science of excellence at prestigious institutions such as Harvard and Columbia. He has served on the advisory board of the Templeton-Cambridge Fellowships in Science & Religion and has been a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Through his diverse contributions, Vedantam continues to explore and shed light on the complexities of human behavior.