Ask Amr Abodraiaa what Rology looks like from the patient's side, and the answer is: nothing at all. Invisibility is the design goal. What the patient gets is the result.

Rology was selected as a 2023 Health Solver. Amr came to the problem as an engineer rather than a doctor, co-founding the company in 2017 to connect hospitals with a global network of remote radiologists. Rology is now FDA-cleared and has delivered more than 1.4 million radiology reports across 13 countries in Africa and the Middle East.

Episode highlights:

The problem was never the machine: The scanner was already in the hospital. The person qualified to read the scan was not. Amr explains why he stopped building the next new “cool” technology and started building the system around it.

Zero setup cost, every time: No new servers, no VPNs, no bandwidth upgrades. Nearly a decade and an FDA clearance later, that mandate still governs every feature Rology ships.

LLMs and VLMs: Machine learning routes each scan to the right specialist and cuts repeat imaging. Vision-language models now draft the report itself. The real gains, Amr says, come from running both together.

Full transcript available here.

Solve is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, and this special series, hosted by Alexander Dale, Director of Global Programs at MIT Solve, highlights 10 Solvers from the past decade who embody the spirit of Solve: innovation, grit, resilience, and impact. Learn more and get involved in our work here: solve.mit.edu 

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Nabiha Syed has been a media lawyer, a newsroom CEO, and now leads the Mozilla Foundation—three careers, one question: does technology hand people power, or quietly take it away? She and Hala Hanna get into human-scale AI, why trust is becoming the only real moat, and the things we shouldn't build at all. Plus: toasters, aunties, and why curiosity is a birthright.

Full transcript available here.

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Helena Samsioe had been to more than 50 countries before she turned 15.

Her parents worked as doctors across Africa and Asia, and that upbringing taught her something that would eventually become a business: the world looks completely different depending on where you are standing. Satellites flatten that difference. Clouds get in the way, resolution drops off, and the closer to the ground the real story lives, the more the picture falls apart.

Helena is our fourth guest in the 10 Years, 10 Solvers series. Solve is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, and this special series, hosted by Alexander Dale, Director of Global Programs at MIT Solve, highlights 10 Solvers from the past decade who embody the spirit of Solve: innovation, grit, resilience, and impact.

Solve selected Globhe for our 2021 Health Security and Pandemics Challenge. Five years later, the platform connects organizations to more than 12,000 certified drone operators in 150 countries, every one of them local to the place they fly.

Tune in for a conversation all about:

The pivot hiding in your own data: Globhe spent its first three years as a drone delivery company. Then clients started asking to buy footage from the delivery routes instead of the deliveries. Helena explains how to hear what the market is actually telling you.

Why the pilot should always be local: Cost, regulation, and impact all point in the same direction. Helena walks through why Globhe never flies operators in from Sweden, and how AI-powered quality control makes that model hold up.

Building an industry, not just a company: In 2015, drones were either military equipment or Hollywood cameras, with almost nothing in between. Helena shares what it took to help shape the regulatory frameworks that made everything since possible.

Courage over hope: Asked to pick one for the future, Helena chooses courage. Hope is hard to sustain, she says, unless you have the courage to pursue it.

Full transcript available here.

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Snap two magnetic blocks together, and a light comes on. In that second, wonder becomes pride because you made it.

Ayah Bdeir built a career on that distinction. littleBits, her magnetic electronics kits, turned millions of kids from tech users into inventors and now sit in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Today she runs Current AI, working with governments, philanthropies, and builders to make public-interest AI real at scale. The reason: the AI we've been handed is the anti-littleBits, sealed and obscure and shipped by a handful of companies.

Tune in for a conversation all about:

The Iftar table AI got wrong: An AI-generated dinner flyer came back with orange hummus. Ayah couldn’t let that slide, and so she worked and iterated until a wayward prompt became an entire mission for cultural preservation at Current AI.

Fund, build, bridge: Six months in, Ayah is running a tech company, a philanthropy, and a government body at once. AI's pace is the only reason those three can move together.

AI's Linux moment: Governments want resilience, enterprises want a cheaper stack, local communities want models that speak their dialect. Ayah makes the case that open can win economically too, but only if you sell the medicine with the sugar.

Full transcript available here.

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How do millions of strangers come to trust one another enough to share a common reality?

In this episode of The Solve Effect, we welcome Katherine Maher, President and CEO of NPR and former CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. Katherine has spent her career building and leading the institutions that help us make sense of the world together—Wikipedia, Signal, and now public media, at a moment when trust in nearly every one of those institutions is under strain.

Tune into a conversation all about:

The Trust Ladder: As local newspapers have disappeared, Katherine explains how we lost the "lowest rung" that once connected our understanding of our neighborhoods to the nation—and why that's fueling polarization today.

Truth vs. Facts: Katherine's TED Talk on truth sparked pushback, including from Elon Musk. She unpacks the difference between the facts we can agree on and the deeper truths we each carry, and why admitting what we don't know builds trust rather than erodes it.

AI and the Open Web: Katherine explains what's at stake when models are trained on models, and why she still believes the open web is worth fighting for.

Leading Without Fear or Favor: As NPR faces federal funding cuts, Katherine makes the case for why mission-driven institutions can out-compete the market for trust and attention and what that looks like in practice.

Full transcript available here.

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Namya Mahajan built a product for parents. Daycare workers started using it too, without anyone asking them to.

Namya is our third guest in the 10 Years, 10 Solvers series. Solve is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, and this special series (hosted by Alexander Dale, Director of Global Programs at MIT Solve) highlights 10 Solvers from the past decade who embody the spirit of Solve: innovation, grit, resilience, and impact.

Namya co-founded Rocket Learning in 2020, meeting parents where they already are: WhatsApp. The nonprofit sends bite-sized, science-backed learning activities in local languages, using things like dough instead of clay and turmeric water instead of paint. Today it reaches more than 6 million children across 16 Indian states, for about $1.50 per child, per year.

Tune in for a conversation all about:

Building for the people who show up: When Namya's team noticed daycare workers using parent-facing content in their own classrooms, they didn't fight it—they built an entire educator program around it. It now reaches 400,000 daycare workers across India.

Proving it, the hard way: A multi-year randomized controlled trial with J-PAL showed one of the highest effect sizes in education—at a fraction of the typical cost. Namya shares what it took to run an evaluation nobody thought they were ready for.

The pitch that missed: Namya walks through a fundraising meeting that went sideways, and what it taught her about listening before you sell your solution.

What comes next: Namya's team is now building an AI-powered tool to personalize learning for millions of children and support the daycare workers teaching them.

Full transcript available here.

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Kumi Naidoo once helped lead a funeral for an iceberg.

Several hundred people gathered in Iceland to mourn something precious that had been with us for centuries and was never coming back. That single act of mourning generated more powerful coverage than almost any campaign from his six years leading Greenpeace. It taught him a lesson he’s carried ever since: facts aim at the brain, but movements are built by speaking to the heart, the body, and the soul. 

On this episode of The Solve Effect, Hala Hanna sits down with Kumi Naidoo: human rights and climate justice activist, former head of Greenpeace International and Amnesty International, and now president of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. From organizing against apartheid as a teenager to building a global “artivism” movement inspired by his late son, the rapper Ricky Rick, Kumi shares what four decades of struggle have taught him about grief, purpose, and refusing to give up.

Tune in for a conversation all about:

Turning off the tap: Fossil fuels drive 86% of climate change, yet for 30 years we’ve mopped the floor without touching the faucet. Kumi makes the case for a binding global treaty to phase them out—in terms your auntie would understand.

Artivism in action: Why “Save Santa Claus” might have been a better banner than “Stop Arctic Destruction,” and how harnessing arts and culture can supply the thing our movements are missing most: imagination.

Participation as the antidote to despair: Whatever the question, the answer is community. Kumi explains why everyone—from single moms to art teachers—has a pathway into this fight, and how his sister Kay proved that the most invisible people often make the biggest contributions.

Joy as resistance: How do you tell the truth about a crisis without immobilizing people? And why is keeping your sense of humor a political act?

Full transcript available here. 

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What if we treated democracy the way Silicon Valley treats software—a flexible tool that we can control and iterate on together until we get it right, knowing that it’s a project with no real end? 

In this episode of The Solve Effect, Hala Hanna sits down with Audrey Tang—Taiwan’s first digital minister, the world’s first openly non-binary cabinet minister, and now Taiwan’s cyber ambassador. Audrey grew up with a heart condition that forced her to be radically calm; she channeled that stillness into one of the most remarkable careers in public life, pushing government trust from single digits to 70%, nearly eliminating deepfake scams on social media, and deploying a COVID response studied around the world.

Tune in for a conversation all about:

Democracy as a technology: Why our current system’s “bandwidth” is too narrow for the challenges we face, and how Taiwan’s tools for broad listening—sortition, deliberation, and civic AI—are expanding it.

AI in the loop of humanity, not the other way around: Audrey’s poem-turned-manifesto flips Silicon Valley’s favorite buzzwords on their head: internet of beings, shared reality, collaborative learning, human experience.

Campfire vs. wildfire: How do you design platforms that illuminate our differences instead of burning us? And what happens when you change the economic incentives so social media companies actually benefit from pro-social behavior?

Peak slop and the path forward: Audrey believes we’re living through peak doom-scrolling—and that the shift toward conversational AI may be the off-ramp we’ve been waiting for.

Full transcript available here.

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What does it take to rewire a public health system from the inside out?

In this episode of The Solve Effect, guest host Alexander Dale, Director of Global Programs at MIT Solve, sits down with Ruchit Nagar, co-founder of Khushi Baby. What began as a Yale classroom project—designing a NFC-enabled pendant to carry children's health records in rural India—has grown into CHIP, one of India's largest community-based digital health platforms. Used by over 85,000 community health workers across 48,000 villages, CHIP has tracked the health of more than 60 million people and identified over 10 million individuals with vulnerable health conditions.

Tune in for a conversation all about:

Starting with the community: The pendant wasn't designed in a classroom—it emerged from fieldwork, where Ruchit noticed the cultural significance of the black thread pendant worn to protect children. Learn how human-centered design shaped every stage of Khushi Baby's evolution.

Scaling with and through government: Going from a 200-person study to a statewide platform in Rajasthan required more than good technology. Hear Ruchit's hard-won advice on earning a seat at the table with complex institutional stakeholders.

Choosing hope: After more than a decade of navigating funding gaps, setbacks, and deferred salaries, Ruchit reflects on what keeps him going—and why manifesting your vision while staying flexible is the only way through.

Full transcript available here.

Are we living in unprecedented times for philanthropy, or have we seen this all before? 

In this episode of The Solve Effect, we welcome the CEO and co-founder of The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Stacy Palmer.

For four decades, Stacy has reported on trends in giving, government funding, and the extremely wealthy people behind it all. With the authority that only comes from paying deep, sustained attention to a field, Stacy brings us through her history to this present moment, where the field is still reeling from the loss of government funding. 

Tune into a conversation all about: 

Concentrated Wealth and Philanthropic Deserts: Why are only 25 of the Forbes 400 giving generously? And is Middle America a philanthropic desert? 

Building an entire field of journalism: When Stacy helped start The Chronicle of Philanthropy, philanthropy was drastically under-covered. Learn more about how she built an entire ecosystem of information and why that matters. 

The importance of big risks in giving: Big problems need big solutions. Sometimes, the only way to build them is through even bigger risks.

Full transcript available here. 

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