Science Summit of the 79th UN General Assembly (UNGA79)

Krystal's first UN General Assembly Science Summit appearance. Panelist on "The Brain Advantage: Towards a Brain-Positive Organization" at the Brain Days side event of the Science Summit of the 79th UN General Assembly, "Neuroscience and Society: A Life Course Approach to Brain Health." The Brain Days programme was co-hosted by the European Brain Council, Brain Capital Alliance, Davos Alzheimer's Collaborative, Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, and UNICEF, and was organized in collaboration with the Business Collaborative for Brain Health.

Krystal used the panel to make the operating case for brain health inside large employers. Shell's pilot study on the protect, promote, and access pillars had shown that data-driven mental health work could in fact land at scale, and the program was rolled out to a roughly 80,000 to 90,000 person workforce in November 2023 in partnership with Wellaba on data privacy and collection. The first cut of data from approximately 25,000 survey respondents pointed at organizational culture as the dominant lever, with three of the four highest-scoring constructs and three of the four lowest-scoring constructs both being organizational, not individual.

The panel surfaced the stigma gap that survey data alone cannot close. One of the highest-scoring questions across all 25,000 respondents was about the role a manager would play in supporting an employee through a mental health event; one of the lowest-scoring questions was the willingness to actually talk about that event. The vast majority of employees believed their managers would be supportive, and the vast majority would still not raise it. Krystal closed with a deliberate message to small and medium-sized organizations watching from a distance: Shell started small, with individually focused programs, built the business case over time, and the health function itself was always extraordinarily small relative to the workforce it served.

Audience: UN delegates, multilateral health and science officials, employer brain-health leads, and the European Brain Council and Davos Alzheimer's Collaborative network. Recordings: Brain Days Day 1 (https://youtu.be/W75_do1Cxik) and Day 2 (https://youtu.be/uQZu_Xwewag).