The Burning Castle Podcast

In this episode I talked with co-founders  Natasha Leporé and Niharika Gajawelli of the startup Voxel Healthcare. Their MD in that space, Justin Low, also joined us. 



Natasha Leporé is one of the founders and the CTO of Voxel Healthcare, where we develop software to automate clinicians’ tasks and provide quantitative assessment of medical images to help in their daily functions. They focus particularly on clinical software for radiologists and radiation oncologists to help assess children's brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). She is also an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, and my laboratory, the Computational Imaging of Brain Organization Research Group (CIBORG), specializes in mathematical and numerical methods to study brain anatomy and function through MRI. These methods are applied to furthering our understanding of different neurological disorders, as well as normal and abnormal brain development. They span all ages from before birth at the fetal stages to elderly adults and every age in between. She graduated with a Bsc in physics and mathematics from the University of Montreal and then obtained a masters in applied mathematics from Cambridge University, in general relativity. Her PhD is in theoretical physics (Harvard University), and deals with quantum chaos in quantum billiards living on the plane and the pseudosphere. Afterward, she switched to neuroimaging and became a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging.

Niharika Gajawelli completed her PhD in Biomedical engineering with Natasha as her advisor and specialized in analyzing brain development in early childhood using brain MRI data, as part of the CIBORG lab at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. Her focus is medical imaging in general, but she continues to be fascinated by MRI and that we can acquire so much information about our body non-invasively. She is also interested in data science and deep learning, and this was one of her motivations to work at Voxel Healthcare and develop software that would be useful in radiology and radiation oncology. Being in a start-up has been an eye-opening experience as it involves many aspects of developing a product, including pitching to potential investors, understanding the FDA regulation pathways, assessing the business strategies, as well as the technical aspects of the product.

Justin graduated from medical school in May of 2019 from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio with a focus on research in Radiation Oncology. He has been with CHLA since 2018 and continued with his research after graduating from medical school. He currently working on a NIH grant funded project that is looking at the prevalence of secondary malignancies in proton vs photon radiation treatment. In August of 2021 he joined Voxel to help head the medical and technological aspects of the software being developed by Voxel. He is currently obtaining a masters in health administration as well.

https://www.voxelhealthcare.com 

Kyle Coroneos is a professional freelance writer, music journalist, and critic. As a popular music and cultural commentator, he has been interviewed, quoted, and profiled by The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, CNN, Fox News, and many other outlets. Along with his website SavingCountryMusic.com, he has previously written for Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, and multiple other periodicals.


If you would like more info, you can find it here: https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/about-saving-country-music/

His website:  https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/

Social Media:
https://twitter.com/KyleCoroneos
https://www.facebook.com/SavingCountryMusic
https://www.instagram.com/saving_country_music/

Yohan Caunegre has been a barista, and more generally involved in the specialty coffee industry since 2010. He’s lived and worked in many different countries including the states, Uk and Australia.He is a partner and GM / Head of training at L'Alchimiste in Bordeaux. L'Alchimiste is a specialty coffee roastery and cafés , who focused on terroir coffees with very high traceability and great social values. They put a lot of work and effort on quality, service, training and sustainability on everything they do at l'Alchimiste.

They get to travel every year to the farms they work with around the world. His coffee inspirations come from many places and industries, but looks up to Tim Wendelboe in Oslo and Coffee Collective in Copenhagen.

 Apart from coffee, his primary passions are natural wine and adventure climbing. If he’s not at the roastery, you'll find him with no cell reception, high in the pyrénéés mountain range.

 @lalchimiste_torrefacteur and www.alchimiste-cafes.com

Born in Ramat Gan, Israel, in 1967, Etgar Keret is the most popular writer among Israel's young generation and has also received international acclaim. He has been published in The New York Times, Le Monde, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Paris Review and Zoetrope, among others. In 2010, Keret was awarded the prestigious French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres decoration. He has twice been a finalist for the O'Connor Short Story Award. Most recently, he was awarded the Charles Bronfman Prize (USA, 2016) and the ADEI-WIZO Prize for The Seven Good Years (Italy, 2016).

In this episode, Etgar and Ashley speak about writing fiction during the pandemic, why the famously productive writer moved to Berlin for a year to "do nothing," the flattening effect social media has on identity, and how growing up as the son of Israeli Holocaust survivors shaped him as a writer who looked out of Israel, and back in time, to the European writers of the diaspora for inspiration. 

Etgar also opens about his latest project, his Substack called Alphabet Soup, how he inspired the great Salman Rushdie to create his own Substack, and why he names his most "pathetic" characters after his most dedicated Substack subscribers

Check out Etgar's Substack here: https://etgarkeret.substack.com/

Read the Tablet Magazine article  discussed,  "The Upgraded Me," here:  https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/upgraded-me-etgar-keret

Read one of Etgar's stories here: https://www.newyorker.com/books/flash-fiction/gravity 

John Dyer is a photographer, novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of Conjunto(University of Texas Press, October,2005) El Vaquero Real, The Original American Cowboy (Bright Sky Press, September, 2007) and San Antonio Hidden Treasures (Private Commission, 2011), Edge of Texas was shot in 2019 and is yet to be published.

John has exhibited his photographs at a wide variety of museums and galleries and is represented by Heidi Vaughan FineArt in Houston, Texas. In 2019, the National Portrait Gallery acquired one of his Selena portraits. John’s exhibition, “Selena Forever/Siempre Selena” opened at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in September, 2021.

 John is the author of The Lure (Amazon, 2016), and The Past Has No Regrets (Amazon, 2017), both novels. He's written several screenplays and produced and directed several short films, including: José, 2016 and I Miss You Already, 2017. Both are currently being broadcast internationally on ShortsTV channel.

 John lives with his wife, the painter Diane Mazur, in San Antonio, Texas.

David Liss is the author of fourteen novels, most recently The Peculiarities. His previous books include A Conspiracy of Paper which was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the 2001 Barry, MacAvity and Edgar awards for Best First novel. The Coffee Trader was also named a New York Times Notable Book and was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the year’s 25 Books to Remember. Many of his novels are currently being developed for television or film.  Liss has worked on numerous comics projects, including Black Panther and Mystery Men for Marvel, The Spider and Green Hornet for Dynamite, and Angelica Tomorrow.

David Liss

The Peculiarities Now on sale!

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Mark Daumail is a singer, songwriter and  founder of the band Cocoon. He is prevalent in the French music scene and signed a record deal early on in his career that most musicians only dream of. His path of music success hasn't always been a straight line, but recently things are starting to come full circle for him in a very interesting way.  

Ben Freeman is a Jewish leader, a Jewish thinker, and a Jewish educator

Born in Scotland, Ben is a gay Jewish author, internationally renowned educator and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion specialist focussing on Jewish identity, combatting Jew-hatred and raising awareness of the Holocaust. His first book,Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People, was released in February 2021, to great international acclaim. He is currently working on his much anticipated follow up, focussing on internalised anti-Jewishness, due to be published in 2023.

As a specialist in the field for over a decade, Ben is a prominent thought-leader on Jewish education, history and identity. He is a trained teacher and experienced lecturer designing and facilitating unique learning experiences for both his students, the general public and global organisations. His work also includes consulting for Emmy Award winning directors on documentary projects, such as Jews of the Wild West.

Currently based in Hong Kong, Ben now heads up the Humanities Team at an American International School and lectures on antisemitism at Hong Kong universities.

Through his work, he aims to educate, inspire and empower both Jewish and non-Jewish people from all over the world.

Follow his work across all major social media platforms through @BenMFreeman.

Amelia Green-Dove is an LA-based documentary filmmaker. She is the producer of award-winning documentary film “Watchers of the Sky” and has served as archival producer on numerous films, including “Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton” and “Without a Net: The Digital Divide in America” and “Above and Beyond: NASA’s Journey to Tomorrow.” Amelia is currently producing a documentary about iconic Southern California surf-rock band, Sublime.

Jericho Green is a man of many talents. You could call him  activists critic, or just one pissed off dude from California. But to me, Jericho is something of a video columnist. In his hundreds of videos, which he usually films on the way to work, Jericho presents a stinging critique of some of the worst of what we see unfolding in America today. He's unapologetic, but deeply thoughtful. The best place to find Jericho is on his great YouTube channel. Just Google Jericho Green. Also, don't forget to check out his awesome hats and t-shirts, which are not to be missed. 

Just as a reminder, this episode was recorded back when the show was called the Meaning Creators in case you hear that name pop up in the interview