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Advancing women to healthcare leadership–and keeping them there.
Women comprise 70% of the healthcare workforce. They hold just 20% of the C-suite.
Each week, host Laurie McGraw bridges that gap through conversations with the women rewriting healthcare’s leadership playbook.
For four months, the CDC's most senior career leader worked out of an empty office. She had cleared it out in April, during a measles outbreak, after she refused to put medications that weren't warranted on an agency toolkit, because she thought each day could be her last. Dr. Debra Houry spent 11 years at the CDC and…
Dr. Debra Clary started her career at 4 a.m. on a Frito-Lay route truck in Detroit. She went on to found and run the Leadership Institute at Humana, and then left to write The Curiosity Curve. On Inspiring Women, Laurie McGraw talks with Debra about the CEO question that sent her into the research: can curiosity be…
Every new medicine has to pass through a clinical trial, and most of those trials are still designed in 200-page Word documents that teams retype by hand. Vivian DeWoskin is working to change that. Vivian is Chief Commercial Officer of Faro AI, the company bringing AI to how clinical trials are designed, backed by a…
In September 2014, Ebola was killing people at the gates of her treatment centres every morning, and Dr. Joanne Liu went to the United Nations to tell member states the truth: the world was losing. A year later, on 3 October 2015, a US airstrike destroyed the Médecins Sans Frontières trauma hospital in Kunduz…
Jodie Morrison never planned to run a company. Her career goal was VP of Clinical, and when the board at Tokai Pharmaceuticals first offered her the CEO role, she said no. She eventually took it on one condition: her board chair would meet with her every week until she felt ready. Six months later, he asked her to…
Bryony Winn graduated from Oxford just after the banks crashed, applied for 102 jobs and got one offer. Today she is CEO of BAYADA Home Health Care, a $2.2 billion organization with 44,000 employees, and the first leader from outside the founding family in its 50-year history. In this episode of Inspiring Women…
Dr. Beth Shapiro, Chief Science Officer at Colossal Biosciences, explains how her team brought back the dire wolf, what they've learned since, and how de-extinction tools are already helping endangered species like the red wolf. Hosted by Laurie McGraw on Inspiring Women. Beth Shapiro is a world-leading ancient DNA…
Susannah Fox spent 14 years at Pew Research mapping how Americans actually behave online, then became the third Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Somewhere between anthropology fieldwork and the federal government, she found the through line that has driven her entire…
Katherine Stueland is President and CEO of GeneDx (Nasdaq: WGS), a $3 billion public company that diagnoses more children with genetic disease than any lab in the world. Since taking over in 2021, she has brought the company to profitability and launched new tests that are changing how rare disease is diagnosed. On…
In this episode of Inspiring Women, host Laurie McGraw (EVP, Transcarent) sits down with Paige Hendrix Buckner, CEO of All Raise, the nonprofit working to grow the power and influence of women and non-binary venture capitalists. Paige breaks down why having the title of "partner" no longer guarantees real…
Dr. Rebecca Mitchell is a physician, product leader, and venture investor — and co-founder of Scrub Capital, a venture firm that's only three years old but has already made close to 20 investments. Her thesis is different from most of Silicon Valley: put clinicians at the center of the investment process, because…
Dr. Eve Cunningham never planned to leave the delivery room. She was a practicing OBGYN — delivering babies, doing surgery, building her family — until a conversation with a Microsoft exec pulled her into virtual care leadership right as Covid forced Providence Health to move its entire clinical operation online in a…
She led moonshot projects at Google X. Then she walked away to take on one of America's hardest problems: a youth mental health crisis where roughly 20 million teens and young adults need care — and only half get it. In this episode of Inspiring Women, Laurie McGraw talks with Obi Felten, founder and CEO of Flourish…
Caroline Stokes tells CEOs something most of them don't want to hear: the AI question everyone is asking is the wrong one. She is the founder of FORWARD, a human capital solutions firm for pioneers, and the author of AfterShock to 2030: A CEO's Guide to Reinvention in the Age of AI, Climate, and Societal Collapse…
SHE THREW AWAY EVERY FINANCIAL MODEL SHE HAD BUILT IN EIGHT YEARS ON WALL STREET. Whitney Johnson graduated from college with a music degree, arrived in New York newly married and broke, and took the only job she could get: secretary to a retail stockbroker. She watched the brokers around her open accounts and…
LORI PRESTESATER SPENT HER CAREER BUILDING COMPANIES AND RUNNING P&LS. THEN SHE JOINED A 175-YEAR-OLD INSTITUTION AND ASKED WHAT IT COULD BECOME. Laurie McGraw sits down with Lori Prestesater, former Senior Vice President of Health Solutions at the American Medical Association, on the eight years she calls the…
Kelly Nierstedt never planned to lead a hospital. She is a first-generation college graduate who worked on Wall Street out of high school, went to nursing school as a second career, and wanted nothing more than to be the best labor and delivery nurse she could be. Then the taps on the shoulder started. Take on this…
Tracy Byers spent 25 years running AI and technology transformations at some of the biggest names in tech and healthcare: HP, GE, Philips, IBM Watson, Change Healthcare, and Optum. Then she did something that looked, from the outside, like a downgrade. She left the giants to lead veterinary software, diagnostic…
Women are great savers, but 70% of their money sits in cash, while it has to last longer because women live longer. Dr. Sylvia Kwan has built her career closing that gap. Dr. Sylvia Kwan joins Laurie McGraw on Inspiring Women for a conversation about money, power, and why the financial industry has been quietly…
Dr. Uché Blackstock spent almost a decade as an associate professor at NYU School of Medicine. From the outside she looked happy and successful — inside, she had never felt so invisible, undervalued, and underappreciated. So she left. When she wrote her resignation op-ed on why Black faculty leave academic medicine…
Michellene Davis began her career as a trial litigator and public defender in Newark, where she kept arguing the same point to juries: if her client had had access to healthcare, none of them would be in that courtroom. That insight has shaped a career spanning law, government, and now national health equity. In this…
Dr. Amber Michelle Hill spent 14 years inside medical research — as a neuroscientist, in the lab, on the preclinical side, and patient-facing — before she discovered the real reason 90% of clinical trials fail. And it has almost nothing to do with the science. In this Inspiring Women conversation, host Laurie McGraw…
What if the biggest health crisis in America is one almost no one is being treated for? In this episode of Inspiring Women, host Laurie McGraw sits down with Alexandra Drane, co-founder and CEO of ARCHANGELS, recorded at the WBL conference. Alexandra has spent her career proving a simple, radical idea: when life goes…
Mary Varghese Presti didn't plan to end up running healthcare AI for one of the most powerful technology companies on earth. She came to the United States at four years old, the daughter of an Indian nurse recruited by Penn Medicine during India's brain drain era. Growing up in Philadelphia in the shadow of one of the…
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