About
The science of well-being only matters to me when it is offered in service of love.
I'm Sará — neuroscientist, medical anthropologist, contemplative scientist, educator, and practitioner. This is the longer version of who I am and the work I have been putting into the world.
I work from a simple conviction: that cultivating loving-awareness is the key to developing and sustaining healthy collective nervous systems.
Where I come from
I am a daughter of California, the land of the indigenous Tongva and Ohlone tribes, and I am a citizen of the world. I have lived in many places, but I was born in Woodland, in Northern California, a verdant part of the world full of redwood trees and sacred oak which has greatly influenced who I am and what I care about. Pitzer College and UCLA are the academic institutions where I formed my passion for exploring the intersection between neuroscience, art, social justice and well-being. I am in love with California, from the deserts of Joshua Tree to the fog covered hills of San Francisco, the towering redwoods of Sonoma and the sweeping shorelines Pt. Reyes. California is where the wild wonder of the desert, ocean and forest meets with the world-building energy of emergent technology. I hope to always call beautiful California my home.
Practice · Twenty-one years in
Full biography
Dr. Sará Yafah King
Dr. Sará Yafah King is a neuroscientist, medical anthropologist, political and learning scientist, education philosopher, artist, social impact entrepreneur, liberatory technologist, and certified yoga and meditation teacher. She is the co-founder and CEO of MindHeart AI — a liberatory technology company developing emotionally aware AI systems grounded in contemplative science, ancestral wisdom, and data sovereignty — and the founder of Love Atlas, a living global map of how humanity uses technology to tend love, healing, and well-being across digital, sonic, visual, written, and embodied forms.
Academic credentials and research
Dr. King holds a Ph.D. in Education with a concentration in Anthropology and Neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles, where her dissertation was the first in the department's history to examine the impact of yoga and meditation interventions in urban schools, co-advised by Dr. Thomas Philip and Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. During her time at UCLA, she served as a graduate student researcher for the Teacher Education Program, working on issues of student and teacher racial identity and classroom engagement. She was also the recipient of UC Regents funding to conduct research on student empathy, culturally relevant pedagogical practices, and the relationship between yoga, meditation, and student emotional health.
After receiving her Ph.D., she completed the NIH Ruth Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellowship in Neurology at Oregon Health and Science University (2019–2022), where she developed the Science of Social Justice as a theoretical framework, followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Public Health at the T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion in Human Health and Social Justice at UC San Diego (2022–2024) where she focused on artificial intelligence, examining LLM's and their potential impact on the development of empathy through video games.
The Science of Social Justice and the Systems-Based Awareness Map
Dr. King is the originator of the Science of Social Justice (SSJ) — an interdisciplinary theoretical framework positing that social justice and well-being are one and the same phenomenon, grounded in the neuroscience of interbeing, intergenerational trauma, and contemplative practice. She is also the inventor of the Systems-Based Awareness Map (SBAM) — the world's first theoretical map of human awareness — developed to explore humanity's capacity to heal intergenerational trauma and tend to what she terms "collective nervous systems." The SBAM is the conceptual foundation of the Mirror of Loving Awareness (MoLA) platform currently in development at MindHeart, as well as the SBAM Explorer, an interactive visualization of human awareness and the Love Atlas, currently being prototyped. Her peer-reviewed SSJ paper was published in The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry (2022).
Liberatory technology and agentic AI
Dr. King has extended the Systems-Based Awareness Map (SBAM) to the frontier of agentic design in AI. She is the originator of biopsychosocial agent design — an emerging discipline applying the SBAM to the architecture of AI agents, proposing that agent systems can be built not from constraint but with integration, co-regulation, and loving-awareness-in-action as their primary protocols. She hypothesizes that the science of human well-being can directly inform the behavior of agents so that they can serve the aims of collective healing and well-being from evaluation to deployment. The Love Atlas, currently in development, will deploy agents designed with the SBAM at their core, creating a reciprocal feedback loop where human healing practices and AI systems co-evolve together in support of flourishing for the human and more than human world.
Afrofuturism, gaming, and contemplative science
Dr. King is a pioneer at the intersection of Afrofuturism, gaming, and contemplative science. As a core member and resident expert in collective well-being at Google's Vitality Labs, she developed a deep collaboration with Ahmed Best — actor, Stanford professor, and co-creator of AfroRithms from the Future — and Dr. Lonny Brooks, a leading scholar of Black speculative arts, using the SBAM to illuminate how Afrofuturist cooperative game-play generates genuine opportunities for healing, growth, and transformation. This collaboration was presented at Google Cloud Next 2024. In October 2022, she participated in the first convening of the Astro Egalitarian Virtual Network (AEVN) at the Long Now Foundation — a gathering co-hosted by Best, Brooks, and Jade Fabello to envision a community-centered Afrofuturist virtual reality pluriverse guided by liberatory principles and ancestral intelligence. In July 2026, Dr. King will present the evolution of this work alongside Best and Brooks at the Games for Change Festival in New York City.
Arts, museums, and cultural institutions
Dr. King has curated neuroscience- and trauma-informed experiential design for major fine arts institutions including the Getty Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Huntington Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Ford Foundation Gallery. She contributed an essay to the anthology Toward Joy — the official literary artifact authored by Dr. Stephanie Sparling Williams that chronicled the development of the new American Wing at the Brooklyn Museum (2025) the curation of which stands as a defining moment in the history of American Art.
Teaching, facilitation, and organizational work
Dr. King has delivered custom keynotes, seminars, and consultations bridging neuroscience, art, music, and embodied practices for collective healing to institutions including Harvard Medical School, Harvard Divinity School, UCLA, Stanford University, Cornell University, and Oxford University, as well as to Nike, the House of Beautiful Business, Esalen, and the Garrison Institute.
During her time at UCLA, she worked as a Teaching Fellow in the Communication Studies department (2013–2017) under the mentorship of civil rights scholar Paul Von Blum, teaching courses on the relationship between art and social movements and evolutionary psychology.
In social justice education, she served as co-director of the Embodied Social Justice Certificate Program (2020–2022) alongside Reverend angel Kyodo Williams.
Fellowships and recognition
Dr. King has been awarded numerous fellowships, including the Garrison Institute Fellowship (2020–2022), the Oregon Fellowship for Diversity in Research (2019–2022), the Restored Warrior Fellowship (2021–2023), and the Society for Neuroscience Associate Fellowship (2019–2021). She was named "One to Watch" by Mindful Magazine in 2021, appeared on the November cover of Yoga Journal as a "Game Changer" for her work bridging neuroscience, social justice, and contemplative practice, and was named one of the "10 Most Powerful Women in Mindfulness" by Mindful Magazine in 2022.
Contemplative + embodied practice
Dr. King is a life long lover of movement as self-expression. She has completed her YTT-200 and YTT-300 yoga teacher trainings and her certification as a mindfulness meditation teacher at Spirit Rock in Marin, California. She has completed eighty-nine days of silent vipassana meditation and has been a devoted practitioner of yoga and meditation for more than twenty years. Dance is also deep within her ancestral memory. Her more recent research efforts focus on exploring improvisational dance as a way to develop an embodied liberatory movement vocabulary which can inform practices of world-building that mirror loving-awareness in action and support the felt experience of healing and well-being through performance combined with liberatory technology.
If you'd like to stay close
Come walk with me a while.
Once a month or so, I send a quiet note — a reflection, a practice you can take into your day, and where I will be next. No funnel. No noise. Just the slow current of the work.
Coastal hills · Dusk over the Pacific