Dr. Shawna Pandya is a Canadian physician, commercial astronaut, aquanaut, researcher, and international speaker working at the intersection of space medicine, human performance, technology, and extreme environments. She is the first named female Canadian commercial astronaut and is scheduled to fly aboard Virgin Galactic’s Delta-class spacecraft with the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences (IIAS).

Dr. Pandya serves as Director of the IIAS Space Medicine Group, Chief Instructor for Operational Space Medicine, Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Alberta, and Chief of Space Medicine at the Advanced SpaceLife Research Institute. She is also VP of Immersive Medicine at Luxsonic Technologies and a Fellow of the Explorers’ Club.

Her field experience spans 12 parabolic-flight campaigns and more than 180 microgravity/reduced-gravity parabolas, two aquanaut missions totaling over 235 hours underwater, suborbital research, centrifuge training, spacecraft emergency egress, sea survival, wilderness medicine, and a command role at the Mars Desert Research Station. Her research has contributed to experiments associated with the International Space Station, Polaris Dawn, and Blue Origin.

She previously trained or interned at the European Astronaut Centre and NASA Johnson Space Center and has published work covering commercial spaceflight medicine, human resilience, space technology, and long-duration space exploration.

An internationally recognized speaker, Dr. Pandya has presented for organizations and institutions including the Canadian Space Agency, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, World Extreme Medicine, and the Explorers’ Club, as well as major aerospace and medical conferences worldwide.

Her recognitions include being named among the Women’s Executive Network Top 100 Most Powerful Women in Canada, the Explorers’ Club 50 Explorers Changing the World, a Canadian Space Agency Space Ambassador, a Karman Pioneer, and a recipient of recognition from the Women’s Space Awards.

Dr. Pandya holds degrees in Neuroscience, Space Studies, and Medicine. Beyond medicine and spaceflight, she is an advanced and rescue diver, solo skydiver, pilot-in-training, and black belt in Taekwondo, reflecting a career built around exploration, resilience, science, and pushing the boundaries of human potential.

In his deeply inspiring book, part memoir, part guide; astronaut and cardiologist Dr. Eiman Jahangir invites readers into a journey shaped by war, rejection, loss, and an unshakable belief in possibility. Born in Tehran during the Iran–Iraq War and raised in Nashville, Jahangir grew up gazing at the night sky with two impossible dreams: to become a doctor and to travel to space.

After multiple NASA finalist rounds, he faced a choice familiar to anyone who has dared greatly: shrink the dream or redefine the path. In the new era of commercial spaceflight, he chose the latter. On August 29, 2024, he became the first Iranian American man to travel to space, proving that the road to extraordinary achievement is rarely straight.

Interwoven throughout his story are eight compelling interviews with modern space pioneers, including current NASA administrator Jared Isaacman; Nicole Stott; Sian Proctor; Kellie Gerardi; Hayley Arceneaux; Eytan Stibbe; Chris Huie; and Drew Gaffney. More than a space memoir, this book offers a hard-earned blueprint for purposeful living. 

Grab this book: https://www.eimanjahangir.com/book/ 

In this episode of the Network Capital Podcast, Sandhya Sabapathy, author of Burn Bright, Build Slow: How to Build a Just Climate Future, explores the ideas, institutions and leadership models required to address the climate crisis.

The conversation reflects Network Capital’s broader interest in how individuals and organisations can combine purpose, intellectual curiosity and practical action. Sandhya argues that lasting progress cannot be built through urgency alone. It requires patient institution-building, equitable systems and leaders capable of balancing commercial ambition with social and environmental responsibility.

Sandhya is the Founder and CEO of Kaleidoscope, a sustainability and business-resilience accelerator. She has worked across more than 40 markets, collaborating with FTSE 100 companies, Fortune 500 businesses and public–private partnerships. She was also recognised among the Financial Times Women of the Future 50 ESG Stars.

The episode examines why climate solutions must be both scalable and just, how businesses can embed sustainability into their operating models, and why meaningful change often requires us to burn bright while building slowly.

Purchase Burn Bright, Build Slow on Amazon UK:
https://kaleidoscope.earth/burn-bright-build-slow/

Harvard's holistic admissions system emerged in the 1920s, in part to reduce the number of Jewish students who had excelled under an examination-based system. "Character" and "fit" became the language through which discrimination could be exercised. That history remains the strongest argument for examinations: anyone with access to the syllabus and sufficient preparation can, in principle, compete on equal terms, and what the paper cannot see cannot be turned against the candidate.

Yet examinations are difficult to defend as the sole criterion for admission. A few hours on a single day can determine a student's future, while late bloomers, unconventional thinkers, and those whose abilities are not easily captured by timed tests are overlooked. Nor are examinations immune to inequality. Years of expensive coaching can meaningfully improve performance, sustaining an industry built on converting financial resources into higher scores.

Holistic admissions try to capture what exams miss: curiosity, resilience, creativity, leadership, and potential. But they also rely on subjective judgement. Essays, interviews, recommendations, and extracurricular activities are difficult to evaluate consistently, and many of the experiences that make an application stand out, from research internships to international volunteering, can be bought just as coaching for entrance exams can.

What is a university for? Is it an institution that identifies those who are already exceptional, or one that cultivates potential?

Himanshu Gulati is an Indian-origin Norwegian politician from the Progress Party and a member of the Storting representing Akershus. Known for his work in education, foreign affairs, and defense, he has built a reputation as a sharp and disciplined voice in Norwegian politics.

He currently serves in leadership roles on the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence and the Enlarged Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee. Gulati first rose to national prominence as one of Norway’s youngest political figures, later becoming the youngest state secretary in the Solberg government, and he remains one of the country’s most recognizable Indian-origin public figures.

In 2007, as user-generated content was upending media, Barry Diller declared that "the truth is there isn't that much talent to go around." Big audiences, he insisted, belonged to trained professionals. The two decades since have complicated that claim. YouTube built a creative economy larger than Hollywood's, and it did so by ignoring the gatekeepers Diller defended. Now AI has reopened the argument with sharper edges.

This episode stages that argument in full. On one side, the claim that AI dismantles the last remaining barriers. A filmmaker without a studio, a composer without an orchestra, a novelist without an agent can now produce work that once required institutional backing, and the biggest beneficiaries are creators the old system excluded, whether by geography, class, or connection. On the other side, the charge that AI produces slop at industrial scale, that content overload buries good work under infinite mediocre work, and that a technology trained on artists' uncompensated labour cannot plausibly be their liberator. Cheaper tools may widen access while narrowing the odds that anything breaks through.

The question underneath is the one Diller raised. Either talent is genuinely rare, in which case flooding the world with tools changes little, or talent was always abundant and merely gatekept, in which case AI is the largest creative enfranchisement in history.

Dr Nuno Castel-Branco is a Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He completed his Ph.D. in the history of science at Johns Hopkins University in 2021 after earning a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Physics at the University of Lisbon. 

Previously, he worked as a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His first book, The Traveling Anatomist: Nicolaus Steno and the Intersection of Disciplines in Early Modern Science was published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2025. 

Dr Castel-Branco's research has been generously supported by institutions such as the Fulbright Program, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Royal Society and, more recently, the John Fell Fund from the University of Oxford. His writing has also appeared in publications such as Isis, Renaissance Quarterly and Annals of Science, as well as in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Scientific American.

1. Substack "Stories of Science" https://nunocastelbranco.substack.com/
   
2. Link to book: https://www.amazon.com/Traveling-Anatomist-Nicolaus-Intersection-Disciplines/dp/0226842290

Space is back at the centre of economic and geopolitical conversations. Over the past few years, SpaceX has become one of the most important technology companies in the world, Starlink has reached millions of users, and Starship has opened a new debate about what becomes possible next.

In this episode, Dhruva speaks with Utkarsh and takes a slightly different approach from the podcast’s usual debate format. Rather than arguing a position, Dhruva plays the role of an interested sceptic and asks questions to explore one central idea: are we at the beginning of a new era in the space economy?

The conversation begins with why space is suddenly attracting so much attention again. It then turns to SpaceX and the economics of access to space, asking what bottlenecks have existed in the past and what new technologies are making possible now. From there, the discussion widens to the business model of space itself, including three possible paths for the sector: colonising space, using space as a resource, and generating technological spillovers that create value on Earth.

The episode also explores the geopolitical question, including the relationship between private companies and governments, and the risks that come with an increasingly strategic space domain. It closes with a broader historical question about what would need to happen for us to say that SpaceX truly changed the course of history.

India is entering a decade where ingenuity under constraint will decide who leads and who falls behind. LeanSpark shows how India’s ‘high-tech jugaad’ is turning scarcity into an innovation superpower—across drones and EVs, fintech and AI, sports, space and public policy. It distils a decade of research and fieldwork into a practical playbook for doing more with less, and for doing it at scale.

This book will help you:

• Build frugal, high-tech ventures that start small but scale smart, using the LeanSpark attributes of lean execution, purposeful simplicity, adaptive scalability and systemic sustainability.
• Design products, services and policies that are affordable, resilient and environmentally conscious—without sacrificing ambition or quality.
• Apply the Frugal Innovation Canvas (FIC) to turn constraints into launchpads, whether you are in a start-up, large company, social enterprise or government.
• Learn from real stories: from drones transforming sports broadcasting and DPIs reshaping finance, to ISRO’s space missions and India’s frugal AI revolution.
• Translate India’s frugal ingenuity into frameworks you can use in any country facing limits of capital, infrastructure or climate.

Order Book https://www.amazon.in/dp/0143480618

Matt Weinzierl is Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development at Harvard Business School, where he is the Joseph and Jacqueline Elbling Professor of Business Administration in the Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

From 2022 through 2025, he served as Faculty Chair of the MBA Program at HBS, where he also teaches courses on economic policy and the space sector. His research focuses on the optimal design of economic policy, in particular taxation, with an emphasis on better understanding the philosophical principles underlying policy choices, and on the commercialization of the space sector and its economic implications. Prior to completing his PhD in economics at Harvard University in 2008, Professor Weinzierl served as the Staff Economist for Macroeconomics on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and worked in the New York office of McKinsey & Company.  

Professor Weinzierl has written on a range of topics in optimal taxation and optimal economic policy more generally. His work in Positive Optimal Tax Theory has focused on identifying and formalizing the goals for tax policy that hold sway among the public, political and economic leaders, and leading tax thinkers, and then characterizing the implications of using those objectives in the analysis of optimal taxation.

Professor Weinzierl currently serves as Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research. He previously served as Senior Associate Dean, Chair of the MBA Program and as Chair of the MBA Required Curriculum (RC). Prior to those positions, he was the coursehead for Business, Government, and the International Economy (BGIE), an RC course, and Chair of MBA Community Standards and the Conduct Review Board at HBS. He has created and currently teaches two courses in the Elective Curriculum: The Role of Government in Market Economies (RoGME) and Space, Public and Commercial Economics (SPACE).

Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier

https://shorturl.at/5W1QU