In this episode, Manasi and Sualeha sit down with Hitha Palepu, author of How To Pack & We're Speaking: The Life Lessons of Kamala Harris. as well as the newsletter #5SmartReads curating the best of news, healthcare, and female-centric success stories reaching over 100,000 accounts.

We kick off this episode by discussing Hitha’s original creative outlet, Hitha On The Go, a lifestyle blog focused on travel that amassed thousands of readers and led to the publishing of her first book. Hitha dives into how this platform served as a contrast to corporate life and how the publishing of her first book led her to take on writing We’re Speaking, which dives deep into various Kamala-isms that Hitha has collected from witnessing Kamala’s journey in politics. Hitha shares how the lessons in this book showcase a blueprint she developed earlier on in her career to become an effective communicator, embrace her ambition & authenticity, and to own her story.

Throughout the episode, we also touch on Hitha’s current role as the CEO of Roshan Pharmaceuticals and the company’s focus on expanding the verticals of aspirin delivery, particularly injectable aspirin, for hospital use. Hitha discusses how by improving aspirin delivery—and consequently decreasing the time it takes to hit the bloodstream—Roshan is providing essential early treatment to the acute leading causes of death. Finally, we close out this episode by discussing Hitha’s fortunate accident in entering the world of startup investing and advising & her thoughts on how current funding models don’t properly serve many entrepreneurs, including female entrepreneurs and mothers.

Follow Hitha on Instagram:

www.instagram.com/hithapalepu

Subscribe to Hitha’s Newsletter #5SmartReads:

hitha.substack.com

In this episode, Manasi and Sualeha sit down with Katie Harbath, a global leader at the intersection of elections, democracy, civic and tech. She is the CEO of Anchor Change, the Senior Advisor at the International Republican Institute, and Fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Integrity Institute, & the Atlantic Council. Previously, Katie spent ten years as a Public Policy Director at Facebook, where she led a global team responsible for managing elections and deployed civic engagement and election integrity products during major elections for every country around the globe including the US, UK, EU, India, Brazil, Canada, Philippines, and Mexico.

We kick off this episode by diving deeper into Katie’s work at Facebook and her thoughts on the necessity for features fighting misinformation and hate speech, country-specific monitoring, and the big question of regulation: when are people exercising their right to organize and protest against their government, as opposed to preparing for a violent insurrection?

In this episode, we also discuss how technology norms differ across democratic and authoritarian countries, redefining what free and fair elections entail and their compounding effect on rapid political changes globally, and proactive vs reactive democracies. Finally, we close out this episode by discussing how in 2024, the future of the internet remains “on the line,” as we can expect to witness a huge geopolitical moment for the world where many major countries are having elections, including India, Indonesia, Mexico, potentially the UK, and 80 others.

Katie’s NYT Guest Essay “I Worked at Facebook. It’s Not Ready for This Year’s Election Wave.”:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/29/opinion/facebook-2022-election.html

In this episode, Manasi and Sualeha sit down with Carol Karahadian, a Sensory and Consumer Science Consultant and previous Director of Product & Process Technology, and Sensory at Starbucks. We open the episode by discussing Carol’s decision to study food science and flavor chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and break down flavor chemistry and sensory science as a field.

We tap into Carol’s experience as the VP of Global Sensory at Firmenich, a Swiss-owned company that specializes in creating flavors and fragrances, and how she developed the skill of analytically assessing taste and smell as senses to develop successful consumer products. We also touch on her use of preference mapping and PCA, or principal component analysis, in order to develop data-driven consumer profiles.

We transition into Carol’s role at Starbucks as a Director of Product & Process Technology, and Sensory and how she applied her experience in sensory science to product development for a lighter roast coffee. We close out the episode by discussing the process of the development of food and beverage products from concept to consumption and techniques for capturing emotion-based insight from consumers.

Learn More About Carol:

https://karahadian.consulting/

In this episode, Manasi and Sualeha sit down with Nashra Balagamwala an experiential designer originally from Pakistan and a graduate of Harvard University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Previously, she worked at Hasbro before transitioning into designing various board games for social impact.

Among her board games that aim to "edutain" players, includes "Monster Hunt", a game created to educate and protect children from sexual abuse, and "Arranged!" a game that allows players to intimately experience the challenges of arranged marriage faced by South-Asian women. In this episode, Nashra shares her journey through her career in game design and the process of designing games that tackle taboo topics with nuance.

She expands on how games as a medium can open up difficult conversations and communicate serious messages while also having the capacity to evoke light-hearted enjoyment. Before we close out the episode, we touch on Nashra's involvement with the Aurat March in Pakistan, the inspiration for her female-centric posters, and honoring Asma Jahangir as a trailblazer for women's rights.

http://nashra.co/

In our latest episode, Manasi and Sualeha interview Dr. Mehlika Toy, an epidemiologist and instructor at Stanford University. In this episode, we start off by discussing the public health burden of Hepatitis B, a viral liver infection, affecting nearly 1 in 30 individuals, or 296 million people worldwide. Mehlika dives deep into her journey from initially pursuing epidemiology to entering the space of decision science and mathematical modeling for public health which was still an emerging field.

While Mehlika’s journey started with her tackling Hepatitis B interventions for migrant groups in the Netherlands given the high prevalence of the disease amongst individuals of Asian descent, her PhD at Harvard led her to pursue a public health fellowship in China, where her research led policymakers in China to produce low-cost drugs for a national hepatitis treatment program. Mehlika further pursued this research at her role at Stanford University’s Asian Liver Center, and was eventually appointed by the WHO to develop a mathematical model that would help calculate country-specific interventions for eliminating the public health burden of hepatitis B by the year 2030.

Finally, we close out the episode by discussing Mehlika’s general process towards developing cost-effective models for chronic disease and the metrics that she uses, as well as her recent work in epidemiologic and economic modeling following a grant from NEEMA, a center at the CDC tackling chronic disease.

Learn more about Dr. Mehlika Toy and her research:

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2018/10/globe-trotting-decision-scientist-seeks-solutions-to-hepatitis-b.html

Calculating Value of Hepatitis B Treatment Using Country-Specific Information (Developed with Stanford Asian Liver Center & WHO):

https://www.hepbcalculator.org/

In this episode, Manasi and Sualeha sit down with Rebecca Hinds, Head of The Work Innovation Lab at Asana and recent Stanford Ph.D. graduate in management science and engineering. We begin this episode by discussing Rebecca's Ph.D. research and how we can define "the future of work" across various industries and time horizons.

Rebecca shares her extensive work in understanding how to optimize for collaborative intelligence in the context of cross-functional teams and in remote and hybrid work environments. We touch on obsessive productivity and how companies can often mistake busyness for productivity and how outcomes-oriented indicators are more accurate measures of productivity within an organization.

Rebecca expands on her role at the Work Innovation Lab at Asana and how Asana's "Doomsday Experiment" enables employees to redesign their meetings through an intense calendar cleanse. Finally, we close out the episode by discussing how companies can future-proof themselves with the inevitable disruption of automation in the workplace through continuous investment in in-house talent.

https://asana.com/work-innovation-lab

In this episode, Manasi and Sualeha sit down with Jocelyn Yow, the Legislative Advocacy Director at IGNITE and Councilmember in the City of Eastvale, California.

Through her current work at IGNITE, Jocelyn develops strong coalitions with various companies and nonprofit organizations across the country to advocate for bills and initiatives on women’s rights and voting rights, such as When We All Vote, PERIOD., Levi's, Anthropologie, and Glossier. Simultaneously, she represents over 70,000 residents in Eastvale to advocate for and sign legislation that addresses the same challenges she faced growing up.

We begin this episode by discussing Jocelyn’s experiences entering the sphere of politics as an immigrant, and how she views modern political engagement as a necessity because policies are never permanent. Jocelyn expands on her current work at IGNITE in authoring and advocating for over 10 bills addressing menstrual inequity in the past year, such as the allocation of $1.25 million in Georgia public schools to address period poverty.

She shares her experiences in tailoring not only her advocacy efforts when interacting with various stakeholders, but even the language included within the bills themselves. In catering to the opinions of lawmakers to pass legislation, Jocelyn addresses how even shifting the narrative of a certain issue can occur through linguistic compromises.

Finally, we close out the episode by discussing Jocelyn’s previous experiences in federal policy and working as an immigration specialist at the House of Representatives, where she shares how even foreign and larger-scale domestic policy directly influences individual communities.

Sualeha tunes in live from Austin, TX at the IGNITE Norma K. Stone Young Women Run Texas 2023 conference. Tune in to hear her moderate From Representation to Influence: Exploring the Power of Media for Social Changes with Emily Flores, Founder of Cripple Media, the first-ever media company where young disabled creatives can shift the lens disabled people are viewed.

Session Location: AT&T Center, 1900 University Ave, Austin, TX 78705

In this episode, Manasi and Sualeha sit down with Rebecca King, The Lead of the World Economic Forum's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR). With a background in consulting, specifically with a focus on education, Rebecca currently works at the WEF to contextualize the interrelationship between emerging technology and governance models in both a local and global context.

We begin the episode by breaking down the promises and misconceptions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, superexponential growth, and the power of emerging industries, such as the growing global bioeconomy that is projected to grow to over $30 trillion in the U.S. alone over the next two decades. Rebecca shares her insight on our current VUCA context—a world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—expanding on how jumps in private and public data accessibility and individual interpretation have influenced VUCA innovation as well as scientific polarization.

Rebecca also expands on how government often finds itself on the back foot of innovation, but experimentation and iteration in government through the form of policy entrepreneurship and gov-tech allows for both tech and innovation to become more aligned. We close out the episode by discussing the framework of agile governance, and its relevance to how countries, organizations, and governments are able to navigate the unknowns of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

World Economic Forum's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR)

https://initiatives.weforum.org/c4ir/home

Rebecca's Work: 

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/09/4ir-tech-policy-making-challenges-future-governance/

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/data-can-help-tackle-global-challenges-2022-predictions/

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/03/should-government-leave-innovation-to-the-private-sector/

In this episode, we sit down with Caitlin Dawson, a postdoctoral researcher, and instructor for the University of Helsinki's Changing Education International Master's Program. Originally from Ohio, she completed both her Master's Degree and Ph.D. in music psychology internationally before shifting to the faculty of educational sciences at the University of Helsinki. 

As the first international program in their faculty with a highly diverse student population, Caitlin explains how a focus on global education and indigenous pedagogies can be ignored in favor of Finnish exceptionalism. We touch on how universal design is defined as eliminating the need to ask for accommodations and how anti-science beliefs are often strongly tied to self-identity. Caitlin also expands on science capital, or how people hold resources in connection to knowledge and science, as power in a modern-day information society.

In the second half, we transition into Caitlin's research in auditory neuroscience. She explains how a person's pitch processing can vary based on their native language, whether earworms are intrusive thoughts, and a fun fact on how music helps us get in sync with each other before closing out the episode!

Caitlin's Work:

Caitlin's Ph.D. dissertation, Effects of linguistics and musical expertise on early auditory processing: Electrophysiological and behavioral evidence:
http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-51-3844-6

University of Helsinki's Changing Education Master's Program:

FINSCI (Fostering Finnish Science Capital) Consortium where Caitlin works:

Babies' Auditory Development: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0078946

Synchrony: https://kateeinarson.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Cirelli-Einarson-Trainor-Dev-Sci-2014.pdf

Earworms: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-020-01750-7