Vivienne Ming

While tech bros used AI to write tweets, she used it to save bipolar patients and build cyborgs for her diabetic son.

Vivienne Ming is a theoretical neuroscientist, a serial entrepreneur, and a self-proclaimed “mad scientist.”

Her obsession? Maximizing human potential.

Vivienne was born Evan Campbell Smith.

By her early twenties, she had dropped out of college, fallen into depression, and was contemplating suicide.

Then she made a decision: if she was going to keep living, she was going to do something substantial.

She flipped a coin between economics and cognitive science.

It landed on cognitive science.

She went back to UC San Diego, earned a degree in cognitive neuroscience, then completed a PhD in psychology and theoretical neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon.

While in grad school, she met Norma, a fellow PhD student.

They fell in love. And one night, Vivienne told her the truth.

“My secret is that I wish I were a woman.”

Norma didn’t run. She listened.

Vivienne underwent hormone therapy after conceiving their first child, Baxter, and completed gender confirmation surgery in 2008.

They later had a second child, Thalia.

Over the next two decades, Vivienne launched six startups, and served as chief scientist at two others.

She invented AI systems that could:
- Predict manic episodes in bipolar patients
- Reunite refugee orphans with surviving relatives
- Help autistic children learn to read facial expressions
- Manage her son’s diabetes in real-time
- Identify and mitigate bias in hiring
- Improve cognitive recovery in TBI and dementia patients
- Assess student creativity and emotional intelligence without standardized tests

In 2011, she co-founded Socos Labs, her fifth company, a “mad science incubator” focused on the intersection of neuroscience, AI, education, and human development.

Then she built The Human Trust, a nonprofit data trust that works on complex social challenges: disability, economic exclusion, algorithmic justice…

She also co-founded Dionysus Health, where she helped create the world’s first biological test for postpartum depression, using AI and epigenetics to identify risk before symptoms appear.

Throughout it all, her central thesis never changed.

AI is not the end of the world. It’s not salvation either.

It’s a tool, and it’s only as useful as the humans who wield it.

The real danger, she says, is that we’ll use AI to do just enough.

That we’ll automate away our creativity. Flatten our curiosity. Become passive operators of tools we don’t fully understand.

When writing her latest book, Robot-Proof, she fed every chapter into Gemini. But not to edit.

“I tell it: You’re my nemesis. Tear this apart. Tell me where I’m wrong. Then I run it again: Now you’re a bored reader. Show me where you got lost.”

Her work has earned her a spot on the BBC 100 Women list, Inc. Magazine’s 10 Women to Watch in Tech, and more than a dozen research and innovation awards.