Piya C. Sorcar

Dr. Piya Sorcar is the founder and CEO of TeachAids, an Adjunct Affiliate at Stanford’s School of Medicine and a Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health. She leads a team of world experts in medicine, public health, and education to address some of the most pressing public health challenges.

TeachAids is an award-winning 501(c)(3) nonprofit social venture that creates breakthrough software addressing numerous persistent problems in health education around the world, including HIV/AIDS, concussion, and COVID-19. A pioneer in the development of infectious disease education, TeachAids HIV education software is used in 82 countries. In partnership with the US Olympic Committee’s National Governing Bodies, TeachAids has launched the CrashCourse concussion education product suite, which includes research-based applications available online as a standard video and in virtual reality. CoviDB is their third health education initiative, a community-edited platform organizing resources across a comprehensive set of topics relating to COVID-19 for free public use.

Sorcar received her Ph.D. in Learning Sciences and Technology Design and her M.A. in Education from Stanford University. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a B.A. in Economics, B.S. in Journalism, and B.S. in Information Systems. She has been an invited speaker at leading universities such as Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Tsinghua, and Yale, and is on the Education Advisory Council for USA Football. MIT Technology Review named her to its TR35 list of the top 35 innovators in the world under 35 and she was the youngest recipient of Stanford’s Alumni Excellence in Education Award.

Selected Publications

Daneshvar D.H., Yutsis M., Baugh C.M., Pea R.D., Goldman S., Grant G.A., Ghajar J., Sanders L.M., Chen C.L., Tenekedjieva L.T., Gurrapu S., Zafonte R.D., Sorcar P. Evaluating the Effect of Concussion Education Programs on Intent to Report Concussion in High School Football. J Athl Train. 2021 Jan 6. Online ahead of print. PMID: 33428746

Strauber B., Sorcar P., Howlett C., Goldman S. Using a picture-embedded method to support acquisition of sight words. Learning and Instruction. Volume 65, February 2020.

Sorcar P., Strauber B., Loyalka P., Kumar N., Goldman S. Sidestepping the Elephant in the Classroom: Using Culturally Appropriate Software To Teach Around Taboos. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA. Best Paper Honorable Mention.

Sorcar P., Nass C., “Teaching Taboo Topics Through Technology”. Book Chapter in Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Advertising: User Generated Content Consumption. 393-435. 2011.

Sorcar P., “National ‘TeachAIDS Day’ in Botswana”. Article, Huffington Post, June 18, 2012.

Sorcar P., “A New Approach to Global HIV/AIDS Education”. Article, Huffington Post, December 1, 2010.

Sorcar P., “Teaching Taboo Topics Without Talking About Them:  An Epistemic Study Of A New Approach To HIV/AIDS Prevention Education in India” Doctoral Dissertation, Stanford University, 2009.