Sahar Yousef Profile
Dr. Sahar Yousef is a cognitive neuroscientist and faculty at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. After spending 15 years doing research on neuroplasticity and how to improve memory, focus, and overall human performance in as little as 7 weeks, she is considered one of the world's leading experts on cognitive training and the science of productivity.
Dr. Sahar runs the Becoming Superhuman Lab and her work and ideas have been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNBC, and The New York Times. She also teaches one of Berkeley's most popular MBA courses called Becoming Superhuman: The Science of Productivity and Performance, which trains busy professionals who think for a living how to get their most important work done, in less time, and with less stress.
In 2024, she was recognized as one of the top 30 management thinkers by Thinkers50—in collaboration with Deloitte—which recognizes those who are making an impact with their ideas, research, and commitment to making the world a better place.
As part of her mission to make neuroscience accessible and actionable to millions of humans, Dr. Sahar has:
• Given over 750 talks and keynotes to knowledge workers in over 50 countries
• Advised executive teams at Fortune 100 companies like Google, Visa, and NVIDIA
• Been invited to speak to the US Congress and the Saudi Arabian government
• Been a featured scientist in the Headspace wellbeing app, which has been seen by over 100 million people globally
• Produced a multi-part video series with John Legend on the science of music and its impact on our focus, sleep, and emotions
• Taught one of the most highly rated online courses on Scott Galloway's education platform Section, which is an intensive version of her Becoming Superhuman MBA course.
Dr. Sahar earned her Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from UC Berkeley, where she studied and developed cognitive training protocols to improve executive function in both healthy high-performers and traumatically brain-injured individuals. Sahar's research areas and background include the neuroscience of focus, meditation, executive function, prioritization, procrastination, and goal management, digital dependence / smartphone addiction, psychophysics, energy management and biological chronotypes, psychopharmacology, clinical burnout risk and prevention.
