Inspiring Women with Laurie McGraw

Janice Chen was a PhD student in Jennifer Doudna's lab at Berkeley when CRISPR was changing biology. The default path was a postdoc and an academic job. Instead, she co-founded Mammoth Biosciences in 2018 with Doudna, Lucas Harrington and Trevor Martin, and by 2021 it was valued at over a billion dollars. Dr. Janice Chen is a co-founder of Mammoth Biosciences and co-invented DETECTR, which uses CRISPR to detect DNA. On Inspiring Women, Laurie McGraw talks with her about the science of CRISPR, t

She led Medicare when it negotiated drug prices for the first time since the program began in 1965. Now she runs Maryland's $20 billion health department. Dr. Meena Seshamani is Maryland's Secretary of Health, appointed by Governor Wes Moore in April 2025 and the first Indian American to hold the post. She is a head and neck surgeon with a doctorate in health economics, helped pass and implement the Affordable Care Act in the Obama administration, and ran Medicare in the Biden administration.

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 served as its Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Director for Program and Science. On August 27, 2025, after CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez was fired, she resigned alongside two cen

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 $37.3M Series B in 2026. Her path started at home: watching her grandmother live with Alzheimer's made her ask what makes a person a person. That question took her to neuroscience 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, Afghanistan, killing 42 people, 14 of them her colleagues. Dr. Liu led Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders as International President from 2013 to 2019, through Ebola in We

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 take the company public. Today Jodie is CEO of Q32 Bio, a public biotech that went through a painful restructuring in 2025 and came out the other side. In 2026, Q32 reported positive