Drive Time

Drive Time

By UCLA AndersonBusiness
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Drive Time episodes

  • Anderson FEMBA Was a Differentiator for This Doctor

    Ishan Asokan, M.D. M.Sc. (’26)

    Clinical Hospitalist, Providence St. Joseph Health
    John Wooden Global Leadership Fellow
    Salo Steinvortz (’26),
    Marketing Manager, Aquent Studios

    Dr. Ishan Asokan (’26) is a clinical hospitalist at Providence St. Joseph Health and a former assistant professor at UCLA Health. His career has encompassed HIV prevention, and LGBTQ advocacy across India, East Africa, Thailand and Jordan.

    After Ishan earned several advanced degrees, including an M.D., he briefly thought he was finished with his education. In his first year out of medical school, he began to feel like he needed a “differentiator” for himself professionally. His mentor advised him to consider UCLA Anderson’s Fully Employed MBA program. In medical school, Ishan says, “You learn how to care for patients really well … [and] apply science very quickly. You learn risk. But you don’t really learn how to work well with people necessarily.” Business school taught him soft skills he didn’t realize he needed as a doctor. “Not only are we dealing with life and death situations in the inpatient wards, but we’re also dealing with interdisciplinary dynamics and understanding how to navigate health systems and complex needs, mobilizing certain resources in a time-efficient manner. And a large part of that ultimately boils down to your person-to-person interaction.”
    At Anderson, Ishan earned the John Wooden Global Leadership Fellowship, the school’s highest honor recognizing students who demonstrate leadership styles espousing ethics, team spirit, hard work and loyalty. He also embarked on a memorable global immersion to Chile with Professor Sebastian Edwards, saying, “Nothing in Med School was that exciting.”

    26 min
  • Anderson FEMBA Adds Maternity to Her Simultaneous Goals

    Jordan Hutkin-Schwartz (’26)

    Associate Director, Chancellor’s Society, UCLA
    Salo Steinvortz (’26),
    Marketing Manager, Aquent Studios

    UCLA Anderson’s Fully Employed MBA students juggle their studies alongside full-time jobs and personal responsibilities. When Jordan Hutkin-Schwartz (’26) entered the program, she added maternity to her list of simultaneous goals. Jordan’s early career experience in entertainment was followed by a hard pivot to the nonprofit sector and, finally, to higher education. Comparing notes with fellow FEMBA student Salo Steinvortz (’26), Jordan talked about how she learned to manage her time, how the highlights of her Anderson education have informed her career decisions, and what she advises prospective students to consider.

    40 min
  • What Does Real Success Look Like?

    Becky Wai (’26)

    Chief Strategy Officer, VSee
    Praveen Gangaraju (’26)
    Architectural Sales and Strategic Accounts, Automatic Openings

    Does success always mean winning versus losing? C-suite leader Becky Wai (’26), a student in UCLA Anderson’s Executive MBA program, says her first successes came through personal responsibility, not competitive wins at work. As chief strategy officer at AI-first digital health platform VSee, she brings global health equity to scale by cultivating collaboration within her team and sharing the success of achieving goals. In a conversation hosted by her classmate Praveen Gangaraju (’26), Wai explained how her early life experiences influenced her to become the telehealth pioneer she is today.

    29 min
  • Embracing the EMBA Challenge

    Alexa Tralla (’26)

    Staff Product Marketing Manager, Illumina
    Praveen Gangaraju (’26)
    Architectural Sales and Strategic Accounts, Automatic Openings

    Strategic program manager Alexa Tralla (EMBA ’26) works at the intersection of science, strategy and commercialization. She’s helped launch some of the biggest global platforms, driving go-to-market success across teams and markets. She’s built her career turning complex ideas into real-world impact.

    Alexa enrolled in UCLA Anderson’s Executive MBA program with the goal of moving into executive leadership within the life sciences space. “I wanted to learn more frameworks and understand the 360 of a business, and I wasn't really getting that fully in my work,” she says. Among the Anderson professors who have most influenced Alexa is John Ullmen (Ph.D. ’02), whose Managerial Interpersonal Communications course taught her to achieve the “higher operating frequency” she needed to advance professionally.

    33 min
  • Learning Unabashedly

    Erin Hiley (B.A. ’98, ’26)

    Chief Legal Officer, American Specialty Health
    Host: Praveen Gangaraju (’26)
    Celebrate 2026 Drive Time Co-Leader

    UCLA Anderson executive MBA alumna and double Bruin Erin Hiley (B.A. ’98, ’26) is chief legal officer at American Specialty Health. Introducing her in conversation, classmate Praveen Gangaraju (’26) said, “She is someone who brings together law, leadership and a strong sense of purpose in a very grounded way.”

    Like many people, Hiley began her career with some uncertainty. She noticed that although we marvel at entrepreneurs’ and executives’ successes following massive failures, we don’t talk as much about the less public adversities — like an organizational change that affects your position, or workplace discrimination that sets you back — that everyone experiences throughout their careers. “We’re kind of silenced on that journey,” she said. “Speaking up for yourself is difficult.”
    Hiley believes that in hindsight we can use those experiences as estimations of our own ability to overcome and to recognize the skill set that we learn from the process. Mentoring young people who have faced disadvantages — which she has done for 18 years and counting — taught her the importance of showing up courageously, and she in turn was able to reassure her mentees they are not alone in grappling with their purpose.
    Earning her EMBA meant stepping outside her lane, which she said she wished she did earlier. Claiming that C-level attorneys are “notoriously bad at finance,” Hiley said she “learned unabashedly” through EMBA and developed confidence in areas she doubted she could master. Up next for Hiley is the chance to use what she’s learned at Anderson to make a greater material impact in her work, applying AI and entrepreneurship, and looking for new ways to “give back” to her community.

    27 min
  • Dream. Fly. Lead.

    Irma Márquez Trapero (’26)

    Chief Executive Officer, LatinoLEAD
    Host: Alexa Tralla (’26)
    Strategic Program Manager | Go-to-Market and Launch Excellence

    In her youth, UCLA Anderson executive MBA alumna Irma Márquez Trapero (’26) was “undocumented,” so she never had the chance to travel abroad. Through Anderson’s global immersion program, she traveled in 2026 to Thailand for experiential learning, which she considers “a dream come true.”

    As founder and CEO of Minnesota-based LatinoLEAD, Irma advocates for policies to advance collective community power. A Mexico-born former DACA (deferred action) recipient, she works toward Latinx leadership development and equity.
    To complete her EMBA, Irma met the challenge of a periodic commute to the West Coast from her Central Time zone location. In conversation with classmate Alexa Tralla (’26), Irma described what she took back with her over the course of the program to apply literally the next day to her professional development, including leadership tenets and strategies. She expected graduate school to fill some academic gaps. What she didn’t anticipate was how immediate and permanent a return on investment her Anderson relationships would yield.
    Irma wrote in her UCLA graduation day LinkedIn post: “This final year pushed me to my absolute limit. In MN, our communities were hit by the terrifying reality of #OperationMetroSurge. Suddenly, the stakes weren’t about business cases or final exams; they were about protecting loved ones, standing alongside our immigrant community, and choosing to be on the right side of history.”

    37 min
  • Sacrifice. Family. Birds.

    Joel Rubin (’26)

    Vice President of Content, Lubetzky Family Foundation
    Host: Alexa Tralla (’26)
    Strategic Program Manager | Go-to-Market and Launch Excellence

    Entertainment industry programmer and developer Joel Rubin (’26) found himself at a career crossroads, frustrated with his job search. Although he was highly qualified in his field, he found that many positions he was interested in required an MBA.

    Joel was persuaded a UCLA Anderson graduate education would help him focus and advance, but, as a fine arts major in college, he was daunted by what he expected to be rigorous math, statistics and finance requirements. When he began to delve into marketing strategy — looking at it for the first time from a client perspective versus strictly from the creative’s side of the desk — he was inspired to reframe his entire reason for going back to school.
    Joel was just starting his winter quarter of the EMBA program when he received the sudden, unexpected — and unwelcome — news that he and his wife and children had to move from L.A. to Dallas. But an inspiring guest lecture by UCLA’s legendary Coach Valorie Kondos Field gave him the boost he needed to embrace the challenge ahead of him instead of dwelling on the downside. “It was what I needed to hear when I needed to hear it,” he says. “It allowed me to recontextualize what I had to do and actually start working on it.”
    He credits his EMBA cohort with unwavering support during that disruptive phase of his life.
    In a period Joel describes as fraught with self-doubt, Anderson executive coaches helped him optimize how he was telling his own story. Over the course of the program, he learned to talk about himself and his applicable skills in a strategic way — such that he was actively recruited via LinkedIn for his current job.

    36 min
  • Healing, Housing and Hope

    Robert Morrison (’26)

    Deputy Executive Director, Housing Works of California
    Host: Salo Steinvortz (’26)
    Marketing Manager | Product, Brand Strategy and Customer Insights | Father
    Robert Morrison is deputy executive director at Housing Works in Los Angeles. He has more than 15 years of frontline and leadership experience expanding peoples’ access to permanent housing and supportive services. He pursued his Anderson MBA because he wanted to learn different ways to solve problems he’d been working to address since 2010, when he began his career in housing solutions.
    Robert studied aerospace as an undergraduate but realized at a post-college career fair that the industry wasn’t calling him. Instead, he joined the Young Adult Volunteers program of the Presbyterian Church, which brought him to Los Angeles to work street outreach at PATH (People Assisting the Homeless) — a choice he told classmate Salo Steinvortz (’26) was inspired in part by the way his family and community rallied around him following a 2006 automobile accident that required a year of recovery.
    At Housing Works, where he has advanced from data manager to deputy executive director, Robert has led major organizational milestones that include the agency’s integration into the CalAIM network, and the launch of the Food Boost program during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond his day job, he has served as president of the Hollywood United Neighborhood Council and is working on Pairwell, a software platform designed to better connect corporate donors with nonprofits.
    As a fully employed MBA student at Anderson, Robert earned the UCLA Ziman Center’s Howard and Irene Levine Distinguished Fellowship.

    35 min
  • Commit to Your EMBA Cohort

    EMBA Council Co-Presidents

    Marisa Lue (’26)
    Staff Program Manager – Technical, Illumina
    Vishnu Singh (B.A. ’08, ’26)
    Associate Counsel, Access Information Management
    Host: Praveen Gangaraju (’26)
    Celebrate 2026 Drive Time Co-Leader
    Just Here for the Conversations

    Marisa Lue (’26) and Vishnu Singh (B.A. ’08, ’26) shared responsibility as co-presidents of UCLA Anderson’s student-led EMBA Council. In a conversation with classmate Praveen Gangaraju (’26), they talked about the immeasurable value of the Anderson executive MBA.

    As EMBA Council co-presidents, they made it a point to connect early with each other and their cohort. As they prepared to graduate, they laid the groundwork for networking and friendships to continue. Marisa’s husband is also her EMBA classmate, and their daughter was born the second weekend of the program: “She has 156 aunts and uncles,” said Marisa. “Our EMBA baby.”
    Marisa, a biotech program manager, and Vishnu, an attorney, agreed that Anderson gave them a thorough education in the latest applications of AI. Other highlights of their student experience included global immersions and exchanges in Peru, Brazil, South Africa, Japan, India, Spain and the UK. Vishnu met his future wife, Caitlin, while on the Peru immersion.
    Their collective advice to future MBAs is, don’t skimp on social activities connected to the program but be realistic and intentional about time management. Be prepared to give up at least one thing in your current life.

    39 min
  • Career vs. Calling

    Jonathan Liu, M.D., FACP (’26)

    Physician Executive | Investor | Becker’s Under 40 | Ex-Amazon | Scaling Healthtech and AI
    Host: Becky Wai (’26)
    CSO | Pragmatic Visionary | Healthtech Executive | Impact-Driven Health Equity

    Dr. Jonathan Liu (EMBA ’26) is on a personal mission to alleviate suffering on a grand scale. Liu was named among Becker’s 100 Healthcare Leaders Under 40 in 2025. He’s a fellow of the American College of Physicians, former principal medical director for Amazon Global Benefits Health & Wellness, and a graduate of UCLA Anderson’s Executive MBA program.

    As a child, he witnessed his father’s experience of end-stage renal failure, involving frequent medical equipment deliveries, countless calls to 911, commotion in his home, and the noise of the machines that kept his dad alive. Inspired by the resiliency of his parents and the first responders who brought his family hope in the middle of despair, Jonathan became an EMT at 16, volunteered with the Red Cross and later studied medicine.
    His leadership experience encompasses the hospital, network, county and state arenas. He created a quality improvement department at the Los Angeles County jail, helping to modernize delivery of medical and behavioral health care in the nation’s largest jail system. As founder and managing partner of strategic advisory startup Bright Beyond Ventures, he’s now focused on leading collaborations to solve complex health and social services problems.
    In conversation with him, EMBA classmate Becky Wai observed how Jonathan’s professional choices are still shaped by his early sense of urgency around his father’s health: “A career is what you build, a calling builds you — especially when life gets tough.”

    49 min

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