Janhavi Pillai, MS
Janhavi Pillai, MS, is a senior data analyst in the Center for Data Analytics, Innovation, and Rigor (DAIR) at the Child Mind Institute. She earned a bachelor’s degree in cognitive science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in data science in biomedicine from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Prior to joining the Child Mind Institute, Pillai worked in the ALBA Language Neurobiology Lab and Dyslexia Center at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. She studied how language is organized in the brain across the lifespan, from children with learning differences such as dyslexia to older adults with neurodegenerative conditions, including variants of aphasia. There, her work in neuroimaging included streamlining preprocessing pipelines, standardizing imaging databases, and developing clinical visualization tools. During her academic training, she also conducted thesis research on neural activation in rodent models of anxiety and supported early-stage startups at the UC Berkeley CITRIS Foundry.
In her current role at the DAIR Center, she supports neuroimaging and data science initiatives by building, testing, and evaluating scalable, reproducible tools for MRI data processing and contributes to efforts that establish principled benchmarking and decision-making frameworks.
Education
- BA, Cognitive Science, University of California, Berkeley
- MS, Data Science in Biomedicine, University of California, Los Angeles
