There’s A Virtuoso At The White House And The Work She’s Doing Is Fascinating

The Huffington Post:

A decade ago, Glamour magazine declared Maya Shankar one of the country’s 10 most impressive women in college. Asked at the time to name her dream job, Shankar said, “Science advisor to the President.”

You can guess how this story ends. How it begins is more unexpected.

The daughter of Indian immigrants, Shankar was a gifted young violinist, accepted by the Juilliard School of Music at age 9 and later selected for private instruction by violin master Itzhak Perlman. In her early teens, she was performing internationally and playing concertos on NPR; a promising musical career stretched ahead.

…

Shankar describes the sullen summer after her musical dreams were smashed. While cleaning her parents’ basement, she came across a book on language development that sparked a new passion: cognitive science, the study of the mind. It became the focus of her undergraduate studies at Yale, then her Ph.D. at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and finally a post-doctoral program at Stanford.

Read the whole story: The Huffington Post