The Wogrammer Podcast

Women supporting other women can be key to persisting in STEM fields. Mareena Robinson Snowden and Joy Marie Johnson share how their friendship of more than 11 years has helped them navigate their careers, from PhDs at MIT to Apple and working on “nuclear for good” as a Stanton Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Enjoy their insights about ‘finishing well,' the support of providing an appropriate response to meaningful accomplishments, and how there isn’t one universal perspective for women or people of color.

Caitlin Kalinowski is the Head of Hardware at Oculus, a virtual reality software company and division of Facebook, Inc. Caitlin was also involved in the product design of the first unibody MacBook Pro, combining her knack for creativity with her talent in product design. In this conversation, Caitlin shares her experience of overcoming feeling “behind” at Stanford, and how she embraced her diverse interests to land professional opportunities. Caitlin opens up about her experience in adjusting to different work cultures, activism in tech, and discusses the importance of persisting through fear for the sake of the end goal.

Mary Vincent’s story is the perfect illustration of how career paths are not linear. After participating in the Peace Corps in Hungary, her passion for the planet guided her career in green tech, from data center efficiency to sustainable agriculture. Learn how she went from a non-technical background to becoming CTO of a wearable tech company, and a global speaker on all things IoT.

Learn how Meena Sankaran channeled her childhood experience of having just 1 hour of clean water a day to founding Ketos, a water intelligence startup that delivers actionable metrics on water safety and sustainability to transform how businesses and people think about water. Her passion as a social entrepreneur extends to supporting refugees. Meena is the Founder and Executive Director of PRERNA, an all-volunteer, all women-led non-profit focused on empowering refugees in the US to help lead sustainable lives. She shares her journey from Mumbai, India to study Electrical Engineering in Texas, demonstrating how grit and the support of others carried her through challenging moments.

In this episode, Wogrammer co-founders share the roots and history of Wogrammer's mission. Erin Summers, Senior Software Engineer at Facebook and Zainab Ghadiyali, key product lead at Airbnb, share how their friendship inspired them to discover a common struggle from which the idea of Wogrammer was born. From female “bragging rights” in STEM to a native American engineer whose story went viral, they share the “why” behind the mission, and the vision they hold for its future.

Michele Madansky talks to Mary Lou Jepsen. She is CEO and Founder of Openwater, which among other things is developing much more cost-effective ways of doing body scans like MRI machines. She is a former executive at Google and Facebook, and as a professor, at MIT she was co-founder and CTO of the One Laptop Per Child. Her experience and talent are vast - In 2008, Time Listed her in their top 100 list (along with the Dalai Lama and Madonna) and she inevitably makes it on to the lists as one of the top women in tech. Most recently for the Forbes Top 50 women in tech list.