About Us
Forever Lab is an art–science lab based at Stanford Medicine focused on expanding models of emotional and existential care.
By bringing artists and scientists into sustained collaboration, we design new approaches to moments of rupture —like illness, caregiving, grief, and transition– that demand both rigor and imagination.
How Forever Lab Began
Janani is an engineer-turned-artist who has spent over 15 years of practice exploring the interface of art and science through deep collaboration. Karleen, meanwhile, is a health scientist who has worked on large-scale team and systems problems within healthcare for decades. She also happens to have spent 12 years as a professional dancer and choreographer. When we first started working together, we kept searching for spaces to convene around this way of working, where artists are elevated as equal partners in health innovation. We soon found that if we wanted such a space for practice, we would have to create it ourselves. We spent a day among the redwoods thinking about what we would want from such a space, and what it should be called. We knew we wanted to work on problems that have endured across the entire history of humanity, and to signal both timelessness and spaciousness. Thus, Forever Lab was born.
Mission
Forever Lab is built on a simple premise: art and culture are powerful yet underleveraged drivers of care innovation.
We unite artists and health scientists as equal collaborators to investigate moments of rupture — including illness, loss, caregiving, and profound transition — through rigorous research and creative inquiry.
Together, we design and translate new models of care, integrating artistic insight with scientific methodology to expand how care is understood, built, and delivered.
Vision
We envision a future in which art and culture are foundational to how health systems evolve. In this future, artists and scientists work as co-equals in shaping knowledge, designing interventions, and building systems that can meet people at moments of vulnerability and profound change.
Care is understood not only as a technical enterprise, but as a cultural and relational one. Beauty, creativity, and disciplined inquiry inform how communities and institutions respond to rupture across the human lifespan — strengthening how we live, accompany one another, and endure.
Values
These principles articulate the intellectual and ethical commitments that guide how the lab operates. They shape how questions are framed, how collaborations are structured, and how knowledge moves from investigation to real-world integration. Each principle functions as a methodological anchor within a larger, integrated system.
Care as Infrastructure
Care is treated as a structural design principle rather than a peripheral concern. The lab centers emotional, relational, and existential dimensions of human life within research and systems development, ensuring that interventions are built with dignity, complexity, and long-term responsibility in mind.
Interdisciplinary Parity
Artists, scientists, designers, clinicians, and communities collaborate as co-equal contributors to knowledge production. The lab structures its work so that artistic and scientific intelligence operate in sustained dialogue, shaping inquiry from the outset rather than entering sequentially.
Rigor and Creative Inquiry
Evidence and imagination are held in productive tension. The lab advances methodologically sound research while embracing artistic experimentation and speculative thinking as legitimate and necessary forms of investigation within health innovation.
Threshold-Centered Design
Moments of rupture — grief, serious illness, caregiving, aging, and profound transition — are approached as critical sites of inquiry and intervention. The lab directs investigation and creation toward these thresholds, asking how systems can respond with greater depth, coherence, and humanity.
Translational Field-Building
The lab develops work with institutional and cultural integration in mind. Investigation and creation are pursued with an eye toward durability and systemic impact, ensuring that artistic–scientific collaboration contributes meaningfully to how health systems evolve over time.