Girl Power Gurus

Dr. Alyssa Whitcraft is a Research Professor at the University of Maryland and the Director of NASA ACRES, NASA's US-focused agriculture program. She helped found NASA Harvest in 2017 and has dedicated her career to applying satellite data, machine learning, and geospatial tools to benefit agriculture worldwide. Her work sits at the cutting edge of space technology, earth science, and sustainable...

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Jean Bennett, Professor Emeritus of Ophthalmology at Penn Medicine and a true pioneer in gene therapy research. Dr. Bennett led the team that developed the first FDA-approved gene therapy to treat inherited blindness, transforming the lives of patients with retinitis pigmentosa and other retinal diseases. Her groundbreaking work spans over three decades and ha...

This episode features Dr. Marianne Baernholdt, Dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Virginia, who brings a unique international perspective to healthcare leadership. Born in Denmark and educated across multiple countries, Dr. Baernholdt's journey spans continents, cultures, and nearly every role within the nursing profession. We discuss her pioneering research in rural healthcare, wh...

This episode features a remarkable conversation with Tara VanDerveer, the recently retired Stanford women's basketball coach and one of the winningest coaches in college basketball history. With 1,216 career wins, three NCAA championships, and an Olympic gold medal, Coach VanDerveer has dedicated 45 years to excellence in coaching and developing young women athletes. We explore Coach VanDerveer's...

The latest episode is with Jenny Rickard, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Common App, a not-for-profit membership organization committed to the pursuit of access, equity, and integrity in the college admission process. Each year, more than one million students, one-third of whom are first-generation, apply to college through Common App's online application. Ms. Rickard was a pleasure...

A new episode with Dr. Wendy Horton , the Chief Executive Officer at UVA Health University Medical Center . Dr. Horton was a pleasure to speak with, it was fun interview with lots of great details about her background and career along with insights, perspectives, and advice for the future.

A super informative and interesting interview with Dr. Prathibha Varkey , the President of the Mayo Clinic Health System . Dr. Varkey leads over 17,000 employees serving 16 community hospitals and 50 multispecialty clinics across 39 communities in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Dr. Varkey is a Professor of Medicine and Preventive Medicine at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science.

Dr. Jennifer Rexford is the Provost, Gordon Y. S. Wu Professor in Engineering, Professor of Computer Science, and formerly the Chair of the Department of Computer Science at  Princeton University . She is an accomplished computer scientists whose research has focused on analysis of computer networks, and in particular network routing, performance measurement, and network management.  She is an aff...

We are very excited to share this new episode with feminist icon Gloria Steinem! Ms. Steinem is a writer, lecturer, political activist, and feminist organizer. She has spent decades traveling in this and other countries as an organizer and lecturer and is a frequent media spokeswoman on issues of equality. She is particularly interested in the shared origins of sex and race caste systems, gender r...

A really fun episode with Lakecia Gunter.  Ms. Gunter serves as the Chief Technology Officer for the Global Partner Solutions Team at Microsoft Corporation. Prior to this role, she also held positions at Microsoft as Vice President and General Manager of the Device Partner Solution Sales Group and Vice President and General Manager of IoT Global and Strategic Engagement. Before joining Microsoft,...

Dr. Melina Kibbe, the Dean of the University of Virginia's School of Medicine, is our latest guest for the podcast. She is an active, practicing vascular surgeon who has maintained an independently funded basic science/translational research laboratory since 2003. Her clinical practice is focused on the care of patients with vascular disease. As a surgeon-scientist, she has been performing indepen...

The latest interview is with Muffet McGraw, a Hall of Famer and one of the winningest coaches in college basketball history.  Mrs. McGraw coached women's basketball for 38 seasons, with 33 of them at the University of Notre Dame.  She is a two-time national champion head coach that amassed 936 career victories with a win percentage of 76 percent.  Her teams made nine trips to the Final Four and sh...

Happy Boston Marathon day! We are excited to share our interview with Kathrine Switzer, an iconic athlete, author, Emmy-award winning broadcaster and advocate for sports and social causes, Ms. Switzer was the first woman to officially register and run the Boston Marathon in 1967. She was attacked in the race by an angry official who tried to rip off her bib number (#261) and throw her out of the r...

In today's episode, we are interviewing Gwen Young, the CEO of Women Business Collaborative (WBC).  Ms. Young is also a Visiting Scholar at the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University.  She has had an amazing career, formerly serving as the Director of the Global Women's Leadership Initiative at the Wilson Center.  Prior to that she worked at some amazing internation...

For our latest episode, we are interviewing Katrín Davíðsdóttir, one of the worlds top CrossFit athletes and the overall female champion for both 2015 and 2016. It was a really fun interview for us, her message was both interesting and inspiring. It was great to hear about her accomplishments, but it was equally rewarding to learn about her challenges and setbacks and how she overcame them. We esp...

In this episode, we interview Dr. Virginia Man-Yee Lee, an award-winning biochemist and neuropathologist who specializes in the research of Alzheimer's disease at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is the John H. Ware 3rd Endowed Professor in Alzheimer's Research, Director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, and the Marian S. Ware Center for Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Program....

We started 2024 by interviewing three time Olympic beach volleyball gold medalist, Misty May-Treanor. Mrs. May-Treanor is considered the greatest beach volleyball player in the history of the sport, thanks to her Olympic gold medals and her 109 career tournament victories. We really enjoyed our conversation with her, we found the story of her athletic career, her experiences outside of professiona...

For this episode we interviewed five-time Olympian Lindsey Jacobellis is the most dominant SBX rider of all time. She is a 2x Olympic gold medalist, 1x Olympic silver medalist, 6-time world champion and 10-time X Games gold medalist. Her World Cup win in Germany marked 31 victories, making her the winningest snowboarder in history. She is a member of the U.S. Snowboardcross Team and is the inspira...

In this episode we interviewed Dr. Emily Carter, the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE), the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment (ACEE), and Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. She is also a member of the executive management team at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory...

In this episode we interviewd Dr. JoAnn Manson, the Professor of Medicine and the Michael and Lee Bell Professor of Women's Health at Harvard Medical School, Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Chief of the Division of Preventive Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH). Dr. Manson is a physician epidemiologist, endocrinologist, and Pri...

For our latest episode we are talking with Dr. Aviv Regev. Dr. Regev is the head of Genentech Research and Early Development. Prior to Genentech, Regev served as Chair of the Faculty and Core Member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and as Professor of Biology at MIT and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is a founding co-chair of the Human Cell Atlas.

This episode's guest is Professor Heidi J. Larson, the Director of The Vaccine Confidence Project.  She is a professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decision Science at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, Seattle; and at the University of Antwerp and KU Leuven, Belgium. Her research focuses on managing ris...

Dr. Zhenan Bao from Stanford University is our latest exciting guest. She is currently a K.K. Lee Professor in Chemical Engineering, and with courtesy appointments in Chemistry and Material Science and Engineering. She was the Department Chair of Chemical Engineering from 2018-2022. She currently has close to 700 referenced publications and more than 80 US patents with a Google Scholar H-index 198...

In the latest episode, we interviewed Caroline Fox, MD, MPH, the Senior Vice President of Genetics and Target Discovery at a Flagship Pioneering start-up company. There, she leads a group applying a novel method of genomics to identify drug targets. Prior to that, she was Vice President and Head of Genome and Biomarker Sciences at Merck Research Labs (MRL), where she lead a group of nearly 150 sci...

In the latest episode, we interviewed Valerie Smith, the current president of Eli's college, Swarthmore College.  She has a very impressive career in which she has served as a professor, academic administrator and  a distinguished scholar of African American literature.