Inspiring Women with Laurie McGraw

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Brittany Barreto, PhD, a geneticist who has focused her career on FemTech (that’s not fintech, it’s femtech, which should just be called healthtech, but for now, let’s stay focused..).  Her company FemTech Focus aims to raise awareness on this $1.1T industry and to support the community of over 1000 founders in this space..  This is done through her p...

  Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Elizabeth Kirk, a senior vice president at Strata Decision Technology.  Liz has spent her career at the intersection of healthcare process automation and optimization to deliver significant financial returns.  Working across teams on complex issues remains a passion.  Personal tragedy, a health diagnosis, and major job changes – Liz has had to face...

  Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Julia Chang who lives in Taiwan and is a Senior Sales Director at Skyworks Solutions.  Julia became interested in technology at a very early age, encouraged by her father and inspired by science fiction superheroes that could fight aliens and solve problems with science!  With a background in engineering, she found that she loved the sales process,...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Dr. Ivor Horn, health equity expert and Chief Health Equity Officer at Google.   For Dr. Horn, her journey to being impactful in medicine began with her father’s care where she saw what it looked like to not be respected.  Early on, having impact led her to academics with an intent to educate physicians on how to deliver culturally competent care.  Dr...

In this episode you will hear: That point in time when this mother/daughter changed their relationship to mentoring and the focus on professional advice v. just parental advice Why a healthy respect for boundaries for Jolene has been important to her in her support for Kate’s growing career. Kate’s reaction to unsolicited advice (not good) and how Jolene practices restraint in giving it! For Jolen...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Anita Lynch about changing company cultures and having that sense of belonging even when you are one of few, or only, in leadership. Anita’s love for data, technology, and leadership started early.  She demonstrated executive presence “on the playground” and learned to code at age ten when her father brought home a TRS-80.  Beyond her parents, she had...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Women Drs. Paneez Khoury and Parker Ruhl, physicians, researchers, public servants who work at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  They are also friends and peer mentors which they view as a professional must have given the dearth of women leaders. In this episode, we discussed the “leaky pipeline” issue given that women medical stud...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Carla Smith, a health sector strategist and Founder of Carla Smith Health.  Over Carla’s storied career working with countless organizations, health systems, providers, payers, technology companies, and non-profits, she has seen enormous change and opportunity that has come with the adoption of technology in healthcare.  For Carla, healthcare matters....

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Wylecia Wiggs Harris, PhD, the CEO of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA). Dr. Harris describes her journey to leadership as one that started with simply saying “yes” to many extra assignments. She learned in time that she did want to be at the top of an organization, and she began to strategize on how to achieve that. This...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Smriti Kirubanandan, a Senior Healthcare Consultant at Tata Consultancy Services where she focuses on strategic planning.  Smriti has many passions which for her is a perfect venn diagram that includes technology, healthcare and food equity.  The area of food equity is receiving new attention with the Biden administration holding its first nutrition a...

  Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Shafia Monroe, a champion of change who has spent her entire professional life focused on creating awareness of the disparities with maternal and infant mortality and creating solutions to solve for them.  While she is known today as the queen mother of doulas and midwives, her beginning came from a family of doers.  For example, her father created...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford.  Speaking with Dr. Stanford is a lesson in humility.  If you don’t have nine degrees to your name, do ~150 lectures per year, actively mentor >50 students, conduct research in both a genetic and epigenetic fashion while simultaneously caring for patients ages 2 – 90 years old in a field you actually helped to create, obesity...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Dr. Sonya Sloan, an orthopedic surgeon, supermom, a woman of faith, an athlete, health equity disruptor, author, educator.  Her life’s work has been centered on paying it forward.  Incredible conversation and you will be inspired hearing about Dr. Sloan’s journey, passions, and pursuit of impact.  Can women have it all?  Dr. Sloan says Yes! Journey no...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Women Alex MacLeod and Jennifer Catella of Intersystems.  Intersystems is a global tech company focused on healthcare, data and analytics.  After an engaging company leadership training, they along with another female leader colleague, began meeting regularly and thought about how they could engage with other female leaders or up and comers in the workplace...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Amanda Gorman, Founder of the Nest Collaborative, an organization that provides telehealth lactation consultation services.  As a pediatric nurse practitioner Amanda found new mothers were often asking “can you help me?” when it came to breast feeding. The need for lactation consultants far outstrips the demand according to recommendations from the Su...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Eileen Maus, CEO of Renovia, a digital therapeutic and diagnostic company focused on women’s health and specifically, women’s pelvic floor health.  As CEO, Eileen spends a good portion of her time on fundraising and reimbursement now that innovations at Renovia have a published clinical trial to their name.  Some of her drive and commitment comes from...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Dr. Yael Katz, CEO of BrainCheck which is focused on democratizing cognitive health.  Yael began her career in academia as a neuroscientist.  After the work of grants and publications, she determined that she wanted her output to be more tangible.  A detour to management consulting taught her a lot, including that she had no appetite for management co...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Alice Benjamin, aka Nurse Alice.  She may have wanted to be an accountant but when her father said she would become a great nurse, she changed course.  Her father, a veteran, lost the battle to heart disease and as Alice was helping navigate his care, translating for her mother, she saw first-hand the impact of implicit bias.  She set her sights on be...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Cassie Smith, Chief of Staff for Wellvana Health.  When Cassie moved to Nashville, she wanted to work at HCA and she did.  When she received a call to be employee #3 at a small primary care start up, she surprised even herself when she said YES.  Start ups may seem glamorous but as Cassie well knows they are filled with many ups and downs.  There have...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Dr. Susan Bailey, practicing allergist/immunologist and lifelong advocate for patients through her work in advocacy.  As the 175th President of the American Medical Association, Dr. Bailey is completing forty years of leadership service in organized medicine.  She claims “I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up” when asked what is next and...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Afsaneh Naimollah, Managing Partner of XEN Partners and Silicon Valley-based healthcare technology executive who has advised over 1000 companies in her thirty years in healthtech.  Afsaneh continues to be energized about healthcare stating it is a bottomless pit of learning.  Having done over 150 M&A transactions, she has sage advice for entrepreneurs...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Sanjida Chowdhury, Vice President and Chief Compliance Officer of Fresenius.   Sanjida prides herself as an executive on not just towing the company line but partnering with her business leader counterparts to achieve greater company objectives.  Empathy is core to her leadership approach.  Working harder to ensure that she can achieve the fully avail...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Dr. Amy Abernethy.  As a leader, physician, researcher, author, public servant, speaker, advocate, and more, Dr. Abernethy’s storied career centers on her WHY.  As an oncologist at Duke, Dr. Abernethy’s patients were relatively young adults.  These patients more often than not would pass away within a few short years after their diagnosis and would fa...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Erica Jain, CEO and CoFounder of Healthie.  Erica created Healthie back when she was in business school.  She is someone who cares about leaving the world a better place.  When she saw her own parents struggle with weight loss, and then to see the devastating impact that comes with mental health issues, and then through her own experience in the healt...

Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Women NING MOSBERGER-TANG and CHIU-KI CHAN in this Mentoring Series episode.  Ning and Chiu-Ki have a number of things in common.  Both began their careers as developers at Google, in fact, Ning was the first female developer there.  Both relocated from the west coast to Boulder, CO.  Both self describe as introverts and have passion, interest and feel obli...