Sumit Nagpal was born to a pair of healthcare entrepreneurs and raised in Kashmir, India.  When he was 13, he came to the United States where he saw diversity for the first time.  Sumit followed his parents into the Ivy [See the full post…]

A computational biologist by training, Imran Haque has managed to achieve the near-impossible: embracing the promise of data science in medicine while retaining his critical faculties.  He may well be just the sort of innovator required at the intersection of [See the full post…]

When Zoe Barry was a kid, she had two things she wanted to be when she grew up, either a veterinarian or “someone who writes checks.” She gave the first a shot and ended up settling on the second.  Today [See the full post…]

In graduate school, Karen Hong’s dream of becoming a biologist crashed into the inconvenient reality that she couldn’t stand working in the lab. Undaunted, Karen, pivoted into venture capital, and hasn’t looked back.

As befits a future geneticist, Karen chose [See the full post…]

Rebecca Kaul had planned to be a doctor.  But life and the HMO era got in the way.  As a result she went down an entirely different and windy path through chemical engineering, public policy, consulting on information systems and [See the full post…]

A brilliant cardiologist and geneticist, Dr. Calum McRae rose to the top of academic medicine – then decided to reinvent it, from the inside.  He just may be the person to do it.

Born on the Isle of Skye off [See the full post…]

Dr. James Dromey was supposed to be a farmer in County Cork, Ireland and has the milking experience to prove it. But apparently cows were not his destiny, even though he was a farm family’s only son. Instead, James left [See the full post…]

Andy Coravos left a promising career at a top private equity firm to follow her passion and pursue intensive training as a software developer; she now works on the frontier of engineering and medicine as CEO and co-founder of Elektra [See the full post…]

Carolyn Magill had planned a life in foreign service or international relations.  But it wasn’t until she found herself at the nexus of healthcare and public policy that she realized she found her home.  She has now traveled through the [See the full post…]

When she was a kid, Toyin Ajayi’s career goal was to “be the boss of something.” Drawn to power suits and authority, she aspired to become an unspecified boss lady. She may be a boss now, but her authority is [See the full post…]

Allison Kurian never had a chance.  The daughter of two prominent academics, Diana Chapman Walsh the former President of Wellesley College and Chris Walsh, a renowned Harvard biochemist – Allison was destined by genetics and environment, it seems, to become [See the full post…]

An unlikely pair, Brian Smith and Jerry Harrison came together over their shared passion for music and science and helping entrepreneurs succeed. Together they are helping healthcare startups find their rhythm and chart a path to success through a new [See the full post…]

Her illustrious career has taken her from clinician to biotech executive to university chancellor to CEO of the world’s largest foundation, yet throughout this exceptional journey, Susan Desmond-Hellmann has remained empathetic, inquisitive, and emphatically true to herself.

Growing up in [See the full post…]

Axel Heitmueller, Ph.D. grew up in Germany, the son of an engineer. Yet, despite the often discrete intellectual structure engineering can impose, Axel’s personal experiences have taught him how important it is to find comfort with a state of gray. [See the full post…]

Passionate about the intersection of policy and medicine, Darshak Sanghavi’s career has taken him from pediatric cardiology to the Obama Administration to his current role as CMO, OptumLabs, always seeking to define and improve on one thing in particular: [See the full post…]

An accomplished linguist who planned to take a job after college with a Russian oligarch (but rethought the notion after the man was nearly assassinated), Ari Caroline’s journey has taken him from language to economics to business to his [See the full post…]

Growing up on Capitol Hill in a Washington, DC political family, Sarah Iselin did the obvious thing, at least to her, by rebelling and going to art school. But when her practical self realized that was going to make for [See the full post…]

An accomplished investment banker who transitioned to become an accomplished executive at leading tech companies including eBay and Google, Stephanie Tilenius has now set her sights on an even more difficult challenge. As CEO of Vida Health she is focused [See the full post…]

Dr. Carla Pugh does a lot of things. She is trauma surgeon, entrepreneur, researcher and educator and is officially a professor of surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine (she also went to UC Berkeley so Go Bears!) and also [See the full post…]

Medical technology thought leader by day, computer gamer by night, Dr. Simon Kos, Global Chief Medical Officer of Microsoft, is a physician, business strategist and technologist who by his own admission is drawn to “bright shiny objects.” But a commitment [See the full post…]

When Harvard cardiologist and geneticist Sek Kathiresan was promoted earlier this year to full professor at Harvard Medical School (he also has an appointment at the Broad Institute), he shared the news in a poignant tweet that basically said, [See the full post…]

If Alex P. Keaton was from Texas, went on to med school, and then trained in oncology, he might have emerged looking something like today’s guest, Dr. Brad Hirsch, an MD/MBA with a doctor’s heart and a businessman’s head, [See the full post…]

A capitalist colored by a deep streak of social consciousness, Marcus Osborne, the leader of Health Transformation at Walmart, grew up in the South and planned on a political life.  But experience in the White House and later [See the full post…]

Story teller, writer, drug developer – Sam Blackman is all three, a philosophy major who became a pediatric oncologist and then a creative drug developer with a penchant for imaginative solutions to translational challenges.

Although he was the son of [See the full post…]

Owen Tripp, Founder and CEO of Grand Rounds, was brought up by parents who taught him that you could do whatever you chose to do and that there was not one clear path to the right door. Owen [See the full post…]