Girl Power Gurus – Details, episodes & analysis

The latest episode is with Jenny Rickard, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Common App, a not-for-profit membership organization committed to the pursuit of access, equity, and integrity in the college admission process. Each year, more than one million students, one-third of whom are first-generation, apply to college through Common App’s online application.

Ms. Rickard was a pleasure to interview, it was fun conversation with lots of great details about her personal journey coupled with great insights and advice for our listeners.

Ms. Rickard has shown a strong commitment to college access as evidenced by her accomplishments as the chief enrollment officer at both the University of Puget Sound and Bryn Mawr and in admission roles at Swarthmore and New York University School of Law. Her extensive service within the national higher education community includes a wide range of roles with the College Board, Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools (ACCIS), US Department of Education, and The Common Application Board of Directors — serving as Board President from 2007 to 2008.

Within the corporate field, Ms. Rickard was a vice president responsible for higher education product strategy at PeopleSoft. She was also a consultant for the higher education software company Datatel and started her career on Wall Street at J.P. Morgan & Co.

Since she joined Common App in August of 2016, the organization has developed a long-term strategic plan and roadmap and has expanded its access initiatives, including the acquisition of Reach Higher, the college access and success campaign founded by former First Lady Michelle Obama during her time in the White House, and the development of a new application system for transfer and adult students.

Ms. Rickard serves on the board of directors for the Posse Foundation and College Possible. She is an advisory board member for the National Education Equity Lab and Liaison GradCAS, a centralized application for graduation admission, and she currently sits on the American Council on Education’s Washington Higher Education Secretariat.

She received a doctorate in higher education management from the University of Pennsylvania; a Master of Business Administration degree from New York University, Stern School of Business; and a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Swarthmore College.

This interview was extra special for Eli and Jordana due to the common connection of Swarthmore College. It was an fun interview for them, especially connecting on all things Swarthmore. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

A new episode with Dr. Wendy Horton, the Chief Executive Officer at UVA Health University Medical Center. Dr. Horton was a pleasure to speak with, it was fun interview with lots of great details about her background and career along with insights, perspectives, and advice for the future.

For our latest episode, we are interviewing Katrín Davíðsdóttir, one of the worlds top CrossFit athletes and the overall female champion for both 2015 and 2016. It was a really fun interview for us, her message was both interesting and inspiring. It was great to hear about her accomplishments, but it was equally rewarding to learn about her challenges and setbacks and how she overcame them. We especially loved her quote of saying “Failing is only failing if you see it as a destination”, this is one of our favorite motivational phrases going forward! Please listen to this episode, we know you will enjoy it!

In this episode, we interview Dr. Virginia Man-Yee Lee, an award-winning biochemist and neuropathologist who specializes in the research of Alzheimer's disease at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is the John H. Ware 3rd Endowed Professor in Alzheimer’s Research, Director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, and the Marian S. Ware Center for Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Program. Dr. Lee’s h-index is 224 and she is listed among the 10 most highly cited AD researchers from 1985-2008 and among the top 400 most highly influential biomedical researchers from 1996-2011. ISI has recognized Dr. Lee as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher and places her in the top 10 most highly cited neuroscientists from 1997 to 2007. Dr. Lee has been ranked 2 among Top Female Scientists for 2022 by Research.com. She received the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.  It was a fun interview for us, Dr. Lee had lots of great stories to share, which we think you will find quite interesting.

We started 2024 by interviewing three time Olympic beach volleyball gold medalist, Misty May-Treanor. Mrs. May-Treanor is considered the greatest beach volleyball player in the history of the sport, thanks to her Olympic gold medals and her 109 career tournament victories. We really enjoyed our conversation with her, we found the story of her athletic career, her experiences outside of professional athletics and her insights as a mother to three girls both inspiring and fascinating. We hope you find this episode as interesting as we did!

For this episode we interviewed five-time Olympian Lindsey Jacobellis is the most dominant SBX rider of all time. She is a 2x Olympic gold medalist, 1x Olympic silver medalist, 6-time world champion and 10-time X Games gold medalist. Her World Cup win in Germany marked 31 victories, making her the winningest snowboarder in history. She is a member of the U.S. Snowboardcross Team and is the inspirational leader and mentor for Super Girl Snow Pro.

In this episode we interviewed Dr. Emily Carter, the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE), the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment (ACEE), and Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. She is also a member of the executive management team at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), serving as Senior Strategic Advisor and Associate Laboratory Director for Applied Materials and Sustainability Sciences.

In this episode we interviewd Dr. JoAnn Manson, the Professor of Medicine and the Michael and Lee Bell Professor of Women’s Health at Harvard Medical School, Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Chief of the Division of Preventive Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH). Dr. Manson is a physician epidemiologist, endocrinologist, and Principal Investigator (PI) or co-PI of several research studies, including the Women’s Health Initiative Clinical Center In Boston, the cardiovascular component of the Nurses’ Health Study, the Vitamin D and Omega-3 TriaL (VITAL); the COSMOS trial, and the Vitamin D for COVID-19 (VIVID) trial.

For our latest episode we are talking with Dr. Aviv Regev. Dr. Regev is the head of Genentech Research and Early Development. Prior to Genentech, Regev served as Chair of the Faculty and Core Member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and as Professor of Biology at MIT and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is a founding co-chair of the Human Cell Atlas.

This episode's guest is Professor Heidi J. Larson, the Director of The Vaccine Confidence Project.  She is a professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decision Science at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, Seattle; and at the University of Antwerp and KU Leuven, Belgium. Her research focuses on managing risk and building trust in vaccines, vaccine trials and building cooperation in the context of disease outbreaks and pandemics.

Prof. Larson previously headed Global Immunization Communication at UNICEF, chaired
Gavi’s Advocacy Task Force, and served on the WHO SAGE Working Group on vaccine
hesitancy. She is the author of STUCK: How Vaccine Rumors Start – and Why They Don’t Go Away (Oxford University Press, 2020). In 2021 she was named by BBC as one of the 100 most
influential women in the world and was awarded the 2021 Edinburgh Medal for her work.