Mahzarin Rustum Banaji was born and raised in India , in the town of Secunderabad , where she attended St. Ann 's High School. Her B.A. is from Nizam College and her M.A. in Psychology from Osmania University in Hyderabad . She received her Ph.D. from Ohio State University (1986), was a postdoctoral fellow at University of Washington , and taught at Yale University from 1986 until 2001 where she was Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Psychology. In 2002 she moved to Harvard University as Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Banaji is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association (Divisions 1, 3, 8 and 9), and the American Psychological Society. She served as Secretary of the APS, on the Board of Scientific Affairs of the APA, and on the Executive Committee of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. She was elected fellow of the Society for Experimental Psychologists in 2005. Banaji has served as Associate Editor of Psychological Review and of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and is currently Co-Editor of Essays in Social Psychology. She serves on the editorial board of several journals, among them Psychological Science, Psychological Review, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and The DuBois Review . Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Third Millennium Foundation.

Banaji was Director of Undergraduate Studies at Yale for several years, chaired APS's Task force on Dissemination of Psychological Science, and served on APA's Committee on the Conduct of Internet Research. Among her awards, she has received Yale's Lex Hixon Prize for Teaching Excellence, a James McKeen Cattell Fund Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2000, her work with R. Bhaskar received the Gordon Allport Prize for Intergroup Relations. With Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, she maintains an educational website that has accumulated over 3 million completed tasks measuring automatic attitudes and beliefs involving self, other individuals, and social groups. It can be reached at www.implicit.harvard.edu , and details of the research may be found at www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~banaji

Banaji studies human thinking and feeling as it unfolds in social context. Her focus is primarily on mental systems that operate in implicit or unconscious mode. In particular, she is interested in the unconscious nature of assessments of self and other humans that reflect feelings and knowledge (often unintended) about their social group membership (e.g., age, race/ethnicity, gender, class). From such study of attitudes and beliefs of adults and children, she asks about the social consequences of unintended thought and feeling. Her work relies on cognitive/affective behavioral measures and neuroimaging (fMRI) with which she explores the implications of her work for theories of individual responsibility and social justice.