Episodes

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 ...

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, Laurie McGraw talks with Bryony about growing up in Zimbabwe, becoming a partner at McKinsey, running health plan operations at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina and Carelon Heal...

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 scientist, MacArthur Fellow, Rhodes Scholar, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of How ...

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 career: wherever there is an imbalance of access to information, there is unnecessary suffering, and closing that gap is where health begins. In this episode of Inspiring Women, host Lau...

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 the day of this recording, she was named a 2026 Fierce 50 honoree for Health Equity. In this episode of Inspiring Women, Katherine talks with host Laurie McGraw about: - Why it take...

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 decision-making power inside VC firms, and why that gap is quietly blocking capital from reaching women and non-binary founders. She shares the data behind All Raise's mission, the current hea...

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 they're the ones who actually know how care gets bought, used, and ignored. In this episode of Inspiring Women, host Laurie McGraw talks with Dr. Mitchell about her winding path — from...

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 single week. That crash course became a career. Today Dr. Cunningham is Chief Medical Officer at Cadence, an AI-powered technology and care delivery company that just raised $100M ...

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 Labs, about a different model for closing that gap: training young adults with lived experience to become accredited, professional peer supporters — and scaling it with telehealth a...

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. Named to the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2026, she was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Leadership Award for a book she deliberately published digital-only to keep its carbon footpri...

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 thought, I want to do that. So she took business courses at night. A boss took a chance on her and moved her into investment banking. Then, while she was pregnant and on the strength of ...

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 pinnacle of her career, and the transition out of it. Most people would not describe the AMA as a high-growth opportunity. Lori came from payers, provider groups, and high-growth technol...

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 project. Take on this unit. Take on another. Today, Kelly is the president of Orlando Health Orlando Regional Medical Center, one of the largest and most complex hospitals in Florid...

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 imaging, and telemedicine at IDEXX. In this episode of Inspiring Women, Tracy sits down with Laurie McGraw to explain why that leap was the smartest bet she could make, and what a career...

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 failing women for decades. Sylvia is the CEO and Chief Investment Officer of Ellevest, a women-founded, women-led investment advisory firm dedicated to closing the gender wealth gap. Th...

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, she was sobbing — grieving the career she wished she could have had. That piece became lightning in a bottle, followed by her instant New York Times bestselling book, Legacy: A Blac...

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 episode of Inspiring Women, host Laurie McGraw sits down with Michellene Davis, Esq., President and CEO of National Medical Fellowships (NMF). Founded in 1946, NMF is one of A...

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 sits down with the founder and CEO of Research Grid (R.grid), the London-based, VC-backed company she built to take the administrative burden out of clinical trials, speed them up, ...

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 wrong, health goes wrong. After gathering more than one billion data points at her former company, Eliza Corporation, she identified what she calls the unmentionables: caregiver s...

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 world's top nursing schools, she watched her mother and many of the women in her Indian community use the nursing profession as a vehicle for immigration, education, and female em...