The Boss Ladies Podcast Manasi Gajjalapurna and Sualeha Irshad

In this episode, Manasi and Sualeha sit down with Andrea Vale, a scientific expedition videographer and photographer and current staff writer at Freethink. Andrea has served as an ocean exploration filmmaker for organizations like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Oxford Anthroposea Expedition and has worked in remote, off-the-grid locations across the world. Previously, Andrea served on National Geographic’s Science and Exploration Team and as a Human Story Specialist on National Geographic’s Out of Eden Project—a 24,000-mile journalistic endeavor to create a global record of human life at the start of a new millennium as told by villagers, nomads, traders, farmers, soldiers, and artists who rarely make the news.

We kick off the episode by diving into Andrea’s experience at Oxford’s Biodiversity Program and her work in quantifying non-human charisma in landscapes, as well as her thoughts on how corporeal charisma applies to ecological conservation. Andrea also dives into her experience taking part in the Madrasa Discourses Project, through which she engaged in dialogue with Indian and Pakistani Islamic scholars to discuss the intersection of traditional Islamic thought and contemporary scientific and philosophical worldviews.

Andrea also elaborates on her work at the Out of Eden Project, and the role that slow journalism played in being able to dissect unknown stories, especially when working on-ground in a remote region of Punjab, India. Andrea also discusses her work managing the Out of Eden Walk Translation Community, and the impact that the linguistic nuance of culturally-dependent stories had on her understanding of translation and on the stories she was sharing. We wrap up this episode by discussing how Andrea approaches her current work as a cinematic storyteller when capturing aspects of nature and biodiversity—what is the line between cinema and reality, and how do storytellers balance it when seeking to highlight universal truths?

Andrea’s Portfolio: https://www.andreavale.com/

Out of Eden Project (still ongoing!): https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/

In our latest episode, we sit down with Dr. Beth Darnall, Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine under the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine. We open the episode with how Dr. Darnall’s path through graduate school led to her focus on revolutionizing treatments for chronic pain.

Dr. Darnall breaks down how pain is a consequence of a diseased state of the nervous system itself and how pain should be viewed as a biopsychosocial condition instead of a purely biomedical problem. She expands on how the current landscape of pain treatment utilizes opioids as a frontline treatment and how her work has focused on harnessing non-pharmaceutical treatments to optimize pain management.

Dr. Darnall dives into her innovation through Empowered Relief, a 1-session intervention that rapidly equips individuals with pain relief skills for chronic pain, acute pain, and surgical recovery, and how this solution expands access to pain care by providing an alternative to traditional pain medications and 16 hours of cognitive behavioral therapy.

She elaborates on her role as the Director of Stanford’s Pain Relief Innovations Lab where she leads NIH and PCORI-funded clinical trials through studies such as EMPOWER and PROGRESS which look at voluntary opioid reduction and pain relief for chronic pain. We close the episode by touching on Dr. Darnall’s role as Chief Science Advisor at AppliedVR and how virtual reality therapeutics enable patients to access an immersive, home-based pain treatment device.

Learn More:
https://profiles.stanford.edu/beth-darnall

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04994-5https://www.appliedvr.io/

In this episode, Manasi and Sualeha sit down with Amanda Calabrese, Co-Founder and CMO at Sequel, which recently received FDA clearance for it’s re-engineered performance-oriented tampon. Sequel’s FDA clearance marks the first time the tampon has been majorly redesigned since it’s invention nearly a century ago.

We kick off the episode by diving into Amanda’s journey through surfing, teaching surfing, and competing in the United States National Lifesaving Team in championships across the world. By starting up her own surf business, Amanda discusses how building a surfing business provided her with transferable skills that spun her towards the world of business and product design, which she pursued through her studies at Stanford.

Throughout the episode, Amanda discusses the journey of building out Sequel through dorm room prototypes, eventually leading her and her co-founder to stumble upon the idea of Sequel’s spiral grooves that wrap diagonally around the tampon—rather than the linear channels of most other tampons on the market—allowing them to absorb more fluid. Amanda dives deeper into the history of tampon innovation, the difference between white label and private label manufacturing, and the vertical integration of tampon mass manufacturers across supply chain and distribution systems that place small companies looking to innovate at a disadvantage.

Towards the end of the episode, Amanda also touches on Sequel’s patenting process, as Sequel has garnered 11 patents in the US and another 7 pending international patents. Through it’s novel manufacturing method, Amanda explains how Sequel can differentiate itself from traditional production and distribution networks and invest more into R&D. We wrap up the episode by discussing the urgency for “need based” innovation in the space of menstrual products rather than white label products which provide the illusion of choice with little differentiation.



Sequel’s Website: https://www.trysequel.com/

Dr. Jen Gunter’s Review of Sequel (post-FDA clearance): https://vajenda.substack.com/p/new-tampon-cleared-by-the-fda

Politico Article on Juliet Thomas & Plan A Health (mobile clinics providing free healthcare services to communities in the Mississippi Delta): https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/18/mississippi-delta-plan-a-mobile-health-clinic-00007251

In our latest episode, Manasi and Sualeha sit down with Rachel Valenzuela—Head of Discovery at Upside Foods, the first company globally to receive FDA approval for cultivated meats from real animal cells—to chat about her journey through chemistry, chemical biology, and genome engineering through the Philippines and the U.S to her current role as a breakthrough scientist studying which cell types can revolutionize our lab-grown meat pipeline.

We begin the episode by diving into Rachel’s PhD research in siRNA efficacy and specificity, which led her to Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI). Rachel discusses her work at the IGI at the nexus of academia and industry, as she worked on projects involving large corporations, such as Pfizer, to both develop scientific tools and think about their applications in a real-world drug discovery pipeline.

In the second half of the episode, we break down the start of Rachel’s journey at UPSIDE Foods over 5 years ago as a Cell Line Engineer alongside less than 10 employees. Rachel breaks down the structure of the early research teams, the decision-making to tackle a wide range of species—including avian, mammalian, and crustacean—to study the cell biology of, and how she has seen UPSIDE Foods evolve drastically as the company develops a higher focus on speeding up the discovery to commercialization pipeline. We close out by discussing how self-mentorship has enabled Rachel to identify and close the gaps she experiences as she pivots across decisions, roles, and projects.

UPSIDE Foods’ Recent USDA Approval For Cultivated Chicken: https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Food/fda-approves-1st-cell-cultivated-meat-upside-foods/story?id=100278334

In this week's episode, Manasi and Sualeha sit down with Kimberly Arcand, a visualization scientist and Emerging Tech Lead for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which has its headquarters at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

We open this episode with Kim's initial start in public health and molecular biology while she was an undergraduate student and her pivot to working for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in 1998. Kim expands on the evolution of her role as both the fields of data visualization and astronomy have further advanced over the last two decades.

Specifically, she shares how she led a team in creating the first-ever 3D print of an exploded star which was put into a VR application, and showcased the power of 3-dimensional interactivity with data by enabling people to walk around a dead star for the first time on Earth.

We transition into how her work has focused on changing the way that we observe our universe and she shares how we can design hardware and tools to better understand and synthesize scientific discovery in a field where so much about our observable universe continues to be unknown.

Kim transitions into black hole exploration across governmental organizations and the private sector and innovation in the methods we use to continue exploring black holes. We close the episode by discussing Kim's ability as a science data "storyteller" through publishing numerous non-fiction books such as "Coloring the Universe: An Insider's Guide to Making Spectacular Images of Space" and “Stars in Your Hand: A Guide to 3D Printing the Cosmos."



Learn More:

https://www.kimarcand.com/

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/12/a-virtual-reality-experience-of-being-inside-an-exploded-star/

In this episode, Manasi and Sualeha sit down with Giulia Geneletti, currently studying European Affairs—specifically, Digital Technologies, New Technologies, and Public Policies—at Sciences Po, and previously worked as a Tech Policy Trainee at the European Union Office in San Francisco connecting Brussels to the Bay.

In this episode, we dive deep into how Giulia initially entered the world of European Tech Policy, her initial policy design projects during undergrad, such as with the CNIL (French Data Protection Authority) on personal data protection rights, and many of her observations on how the EU Hub in SF serves as a central location to collaborate with those working in policy, industry, academia, and civil society, especially with a focus on digital technology.

Throughout the episode, we also discuss the breadth of policy practices that the EU has prioritized in the past several years in their approach to data privacy & technological regulation. Giulia walks us through the evolution of the EU’s digital policies—from the GDPR to AI Act (passing through DSA and DMA)—across social media and platform regulation to AI governance. Giulia builds on the ways in which the DSA and DMA will hopefully redefine the EU’s digital marketplace over the long-term in alignment with rapidly evolving technological developments bringing opportunities and challenges, while also considering how these policies might act as a blueprint in the regulation of platforms cases globally.