Dr. Nina Vasan
Psychiatrist & Director at the Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation
Nina Vasan, MD, MBA, is a psychiatrist and a leading authority on digital well-being and AI safety. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University and the Founder and Director of Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation, the first academic laboratory dedicated to mental health innovation.
Dr. Vasan's work translates clinical and public-health insight into safeguards for the technology platforms people use every day. She has advised Pinterest, TikTok, and ML Commons — partnering with ML Commons to establish the first mental health safety benchmarks for large language models — and developed the Stanford Brainstorm Social Media Safety Plan and the Framework for Healthy AI, which shape how emotionally responsive AI systems are designed with psychological safety at the center.
She previously served as Chief Medical Officer of Real, founded the American Psychiatric Association's Innovation Lab and chaired its first Committee on Innovation, and has advised the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and Common Sense Media. She is the founder of Silicon Valley Executive Psychiatry and co-author of the #1 bestselling Do Good Well: Your Guide to Leadership, Action, and Social Innovation.
Dr. Vasan is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Medical School, and Stanford's psychiatry residency and MBA programs.
Explore their work
The Stanford Brainstorm Social Media Safety Plan
JMIR Mental Health, 2025.
A new clinical tool for helping young people and families use social media more safely, introduced in the peer-reviewed literature.
First mental health safety benchmarks for LLMs, with ML Commons
Co-developed the first standardized benchmarks for evaluating how large language models respond in mental health contexts.
Framework for Healthy AI
A framework guiding how emotionally responsive AI systems can be designed with psychological safety and well-being at the center.
Do Good Well: Your Guide to Leadership, Action, and Social Innovation
A #1 bestselling guide to social innovation and leadership.
