Girl Power Gurus

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 affiliated faculty member in electrical and computer engineering, operations research and financial engineering, applied and computational mathematics, gender and sexuality studies, Center for Information Technology Policy, High Meadows Environmental Institute and Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering.

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 roles and child abuse as roots of violence, non-violent conflict resolution, the cultures of indigenous peoples, and organizing across boundaries for peace and justice. She lives in New York City.

It was a very fun episode for Annika and Sofia, leading up to it there was excitement and disbelief from family members that they were going to interview Gloria Steinem! Ms. Steinem was a joy to speak with, her stories, insights and advice were so interesting to hear and her humbleness with regard to her place in feminism made us love her all the more. If you believe in feminism and women's causes, this is a must listen episode! A huge thanks to Ms. Steinem from all the Girl Power Guru team!

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 independent research and mentoring trainees in the conduct of hypothesis-driven research. To date, she has mentored 41 postdoctoral fellows, 9 graduate students, 13 medical students, and 21 undergraduate students in research. She also has had significant experience with clinical research and clinical trials, having served as national PI or site PI of gene-and cell-based therapies for critical limb ischemia and peripheral artery disease.

She previously held the Colin G. Thomas Jr. Distinguished Professorship and Chair of the Department of Surgery at UNC School of Medicine. Kibbe is also the editor-in-chief for the journal JAMA Surgery, and past president for the Association for Academic Surgery, Midwestern Vascular Surgical Society, and the Association of VA Surgeons.

Eli and Sofia greatly enjoyed their conversation with Dr. Kibbe. She exhibited a strong energy of excitement and enthusiasm throughout the interview, which made for a great episode. We hope you enjoy listening to our conversation!

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 she collected consensus National Coach of the Year honors three times throughout her legendary career.

McGraw's Irish squads accumulated 14 regular-season conference titles, including eight straight from 2012-19, 11 conference tournament championships (including six in her final eight years at Notre Dame) and made seven trips to the NCAA Division I Women's National Championship game. Additionally, McGraw earned seven conference Coach of the Year honors across five leagues. McGraw coached 22 All-Americans and 20 future WNBA players, including No. 1 overall picks Jewell Loyd and Jackie Young.

McGraw was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2017, following her induction in both the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame (2011) and the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame (2014). She is also a member of St. Joseph's University Women's Basketball and the Philadelphia Big Five Halls of Fame.

Eli and Katelyn had a great conversation with Coach McGraw, which we think you will enjoy!

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 race because she was a woman. She finished the 26.2 mile distance anyway and went on win the 1974 New York City Marathon and to champion women in the sport globally, most notably leading the drive to make the women's marathon an official Olympic event in 1984. Now, 58% of all runners in the USA are women. To celebrate this social revolution, and to support another on active aging, Switzer ran the Boston Marathon again, at age 70, on the 50th anniversary of her iconic run, finishing only 24 minutes slower than she did when she was 20. This run launched her non-profit '261 Fearless' --named after that famous bib number--which empowers women globally though running. She has been honored widely for her achievements including being inducted into the USA National Women's Hall of Fame which recognized her for creating positive social change throughout her storied career.

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 international organizations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Medecins Sans Frontieres, the International Rescue Committee, and the Harvard Institute for International Development. She is our first CEO guest and we were very excited to learn about her work at WBC and about her career. Please take a few minutes to listen to this episode, her stories and her words of wisdom make this a can't miss episode!

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 especially loved her quote of saying "Failing is only failing if you see it as a destination", this is one of our favorite motivational phrases going forward! Please listen to this episode, we know you will enjoy it!

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. Dr. Lee's h-index is 224 and she is listed among the 10 most highly cited AD researchers from 1985-2008 and among the top 400 most highly influential biomedical researchers from 1996-2011. ISI has recognized Dr. Lee as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher and places her in the top 10 most highly cited neuroscientists from 1997 to 2007. Dr. Lee has been ranked 2 among Top Female Scientists for 2022 by Research.com. She received the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. It was a fun interview for us, Dr. Lee had lots of great stories to share, which we think you will find quite interesting.

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 professional athletics and her insights as a mother to three girls both inspiring and fascinating. We hope you find this episode as interesting as we did!