Krystal Sexton, PhD

Krystal Sexton, PhD is the founder and principal of Cognitive Capital Group, a boutique consultancy that helps large organizations turn employee brain health into a measurable business advantage. A brain-health epidemiologist with 13 years inside Shell, she is a recurring speaker at the UN General Assembly, the G7 Brain Health Summit, and the World Economic Forum’s Brain House at Davos.

Krystal Sexton grew up in southern Louisiana, the kind of place where what people did for a living and how they took care of each other were the same conversation. She studied mathematics at McNeese State University, then biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston. Her academic training in epidemiology was shaped by the cancer research community at the MD Anderson Cancer Center and Baylor College of Medicine, where she did postdoctoral work and faculty research on breast cancer. Her early peer-reviewed work, published in journals including Cancer and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, earned her a TIME Magazine feature in 2010 for research connecting body size to breast cancer risk in Hispanic and African American women.

In 2012 she joined Shell as a senior epidemiologist. What was supposed to be a step out of academia became a thirteen-year practice in designing population health programs at Fortune 10 scale. She led teams that built holistic employee health measurement frameworks that crossed traditional health metrics with business outcome data, the architecture of what is now called health analytics as business intelligence.

Along the way her work pulled her onto a different stage. She presented at the 79th and 80th sessions of the United Nations General Assembly Science Summit on the brain-positive organization. She spoke at the G7 Brain Health Summit on the brain economy as essential infrastructure. She joined the conversation at the World Economic Forum in Davos on what cognitive capacity becomes worth in an AI-accelerated economy. The Wall Street Journal, TIME, and Fortune have featured her commentary on workplace mental health and the brain economy.

Cognitive Capital Group was founded to do at scale what she had spent more than a decade doing inside one organization. The firm exists because most of what passes for workplace wellness is theatre layered over an operating system the organization does not realize it is already running. The science on what protects and degrades cognitive capacity is settled. The interventions are known. What is missing in most organizations is the leadership commitment, the diagnostic rigor, and the measurement system to treat brain health the way the organization already treats capital and technology. CCG works with a small number of organizations, founder-led, year by year.

Krystal sits on the board of the Health Enhancement Research Organization (HERO). She is a founding collaborator of the Business Collaborative for Brain Health. She is a featured contributor at the Center for BrainHealth at UT Dallas, where Cognitive Capital Group holds a founding partnership. She advises clients across enterprise, healthcare, and academic settings, and she takes a small number of new engagements each year. The shape of the work is collaborative, evidence-based, and unhurried.