Ambitiously Her

In this episode, Dr. Mariana Quiroga Londoño sits down with Dr. Chloe Kirk, a biochemistry and molecular biology PhD, former patent law technical specialist and the science communicator behind Chloe the Scientist. Chloe shares how she went from the bench to patent law to building a career around making science accessible. She is open about burnout, about a PhD experience, and about rebuilding her...

Dorothy Chou spent nearly a decade shaping how AI meets the public, from building the industry’s first transparency report to leading the public engagement lab at Google DeepMind. Now she’s an angel investor with 40+ companies in her portfolio and chair of UCL Partners. In this conversation, she shares how a self-described “worst at science and math” kid of biologist immigrants ended up at the cen...

In this episode, Dr. Mariana sits down with Dr. Sydney Conroy, a therapist, writer, educator and researcher focused on mental health, trauma and play therapy. Sydney earned her PhD from the University of Cambridge, where she studied the impact of COVID-19 on mental health and collective trauma recovery. She is also the creator of the Soft Academia Planner and the Soft Academia advice column on Sub...

Dr. Simone Webb is a Royal Society Career Development Fellow at Newcastle University to transition to become a PI, where she investigates one of biology's most intriguing frontiers: how the nervous system regulates the formation of blood and immune cells. With a PhD from Newcastle, an MSci from UCL, and multiple publications in the world's most prestigious scientific journals, she's bu...

In this episode of Ambitiously Her, host Dr. Mariana Quiroga Londoño sits down with Dr. Cindy Pham, a postdoctoral research associate in neurodevelopment and mental health at King's College London, for a conversation that goes far deeper than academia. Cindy shares her journey as a first-generation Vietnamese-Australian scientist: from her father's escape from Vietnam by boat with less tha...

Julia Viladevall, PhD researcher in hematology at the University of Cambridge's Stem Cell Institute, joins the show to talk about the winding, deeply personal path that led her there. In this episode, Dr. Mariana sits down with Julia to talk about her journey from Argentona, near Barcelona, ​​to Paris to Cambridge, and how a Hodgkin's lymphoma diagnosis at 21, just days into her dream rese...

You don't need a PhD to build a career in biotech; you need curiosity, consistency, and the courage to say yes. In this episode, Dr. Mariana sits down with Marie, founder of Lab Skills Academy (@labskillsacademy) and host of the When in STEM Podcast, to talk about her unconventional path into cell and gene therapy. Marie shares how a bachelor's degree and Northeastern University's co-o...

In this episode, Dr. Mariana Quiroga Londoño sits down with her longtime friend and fellow bioinformatician, Dr. Camila Lyons, a PhD from Cambridge University and now a postdoc at EMBL. But this conversation goes far beyond the CV. Mariana and Camila open up about what it's like to be women navigating male-dominated rooms, the loneliness of a PhD, being ghosted after job interviews, and the co...

Most people underestimate how deeply discipline shapes your identity and how much pushing through discomfort can unlock hidden strength. In this episode of Ambitiously Her, Dr. Mariana Quiroga Londoño shares how training for Hyrox, a demanding hybrid fitness race, transformed her perspective on resilience, purpose, and self-love, proving that even without an athletic background, you can conquer go...

Most of us struggle with balancing careers, motherhood, and personal dreams, but Dr. Fernanda Sulantay Vargas proves it’s possible. In this episode, Mariana and Fernanda discuss Fernanda’s journey from community college to a Yale PhD in computational science, all while raising two children and breaking barriers as a Salvadoran immigrant and first-generation Latina in STEM. Fernanda opens up about...

This is the episode before Episode 1, the one where Mariana shares her own path. Where she came from, what she carried, and why that journey is exactly what led her to create this podcast. Ambitiously Her is for the woman who refuses to shrink. The one who is building something meaningful and knows the path forward is rarely a straight line. If you've ever felt like you're doing too much a...