Inspiring Women with Laurie McGraw

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, and make them more diverse and representative of the people the medicines are meant to serve. Research Grid didn't start as Research Grid. It grew out of Movement for Hope, a nonprofit Amber founded during her academic years that brought researchers, artists, and patient advocates together to raise awareness for neurological conditions. When COVID shut the events down and investors passed on the idea, she repurposed the technology — and the hard-won community relationships behind it — into two AI products: Inclusive, which automates everything that happens before a trial starts and expands access to underrepresented patients, and Trial Engine, which automates the back office of the trial itself. Today that network spans 99,000+ communities, 400 million members across 157 countries, and 2,000 health indications — all built by hand, over years, with no bought data, while the company stayed stealth for four years before launching in 2023. Amber breaks down why a single medicine takes 10 to 14 years to go from bench to bedside, why $400 million per trial is burned on admin alone, and how women were once excluded from drug testing entirely. Then she gets brutally honest about raising money as a woman of color in a world where less than 2% of funding reaches female founders — including the investor-scoring matrix she built to decide who's even worth her time. And through all of it, she stays an artist: every painting in her home, including the giant acrylic pour behind her, is her own. WHAT WE COVER: - The art-and-science mind behind the company — and why painting quiets her thinking - 14 years as an end-to-end researcher, and how Movement for Hope became Research Grid - Why 90% of clinical trials fail — and why it's an admin problem, not a science one - The hidden cost of research: $400M per trial and 28,000 hours per person on admin - Why 84% of trials still don't reach the people who need them in time - How women were excluded from drug trials, and the fight to diversify research - Building a 400-million-member network the hard way, with no bought data - How AI took a six-month site feasibility process down to minutes - The truth about raising capital when you're "different from the person across the table" - How she scores and filters investors instead of chasing them - Repositioning to seed and landing in the top 1% of seed-stage companies globally - Her golden rule for founders: never assume common sense GUEST: Dr. Amber Michelle Hill, Founder & CEO, Research Grid (R.grid) HOST: Laurie McGraw ABOUT INSPIRING WOMEN: Inspiring Women with Laurie McGraw features candid conversations with the women leaders, founders, and changemakers reshaping their industries. 🔔 Subscribe for more Inspiring Women conversations. 💬 What hit hardest for you? Tell us in the comments. #InspiringWomen #FemaleFounders #ClinicalTrials #AIinHealthcare #WomenInTech #StartupFunding #DrAmberHill #ResearchGrid

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 stress, financial stress, relationship stress, and workplace stress. Her conclusion was that these are among the biggest diseases in the United States, and that at the center of all of them sits the unpaid caregiver. Today, more than 40 percent of adults are unpaid caregivers, and between 40 and 50 percent of them are men. Drawing on both the data and her own experience caring for her sister-in-law, who died of glioblastoma at 32, Alexandra makes the case for why caregiving must be recognized, measured, and celebrated. IN THIS EPISODE: - How unpaid caregiving is really defined, and the many roles people never recognize as caregiving, from installing grab bars to handling finances and navigating benefits - Why 40 to 50 percent of caregivers are men, and why so many never see themselves in the role - How gathering over a billion data points at Eliza Corporation led her to the unmentionables - Why she insists on broadening the definition of health to include life - The personal loss that shaped her mission, and the founding of Engage with Grace - Why she uses the word intensity instead of burden, and what that reframe makes possible - The Caregiver Intensity Index, and what it means to be in the clear, yellow, or red - Why being in the red means a 90 percent risk of a mental health impact, a 50 percent drop in productivity, and four times the cost - How the share of caregivers in the red tripled from 8 percent before COVID and never came back down - The sandwich generation, the panini, and the club sandwich, and why double-duty caregivers face double the intensity - Overtreatment, the rising cost of care, and what it really means for the great wealth transfer - The growing gap between how many people will need care and how few are available to give it - The Care Badge, built in partnership with Joint Commission, and why a career break was never a gap, it was a job - The skills caregivers build, and why they are exactly the people employers should be hiring - Grief, the rogue waves that keep coming, and the phrase that drives her: memento mori Alexandra Drane is a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of ARCHANGELS, a women-owned public benefit corporation supporting unpaid caregivers across all 50 states. She previously co-founded Eliza Corporation and Engage with Grace, among other companies. Inspiring Women is a weekly podcast about advancing women to healthcare leadership and keeping them there. Women make up 70 percent of the healthcare workforce but hold just 20 percent of the C-suite. Each week, Laurie bridges that gap through conversations with the women rewriting healthcare's leadership playbook. Subscribe for new episodes, and share this one with a caregiver in your life. #InspiringWomen #Caregiving #UnpaidCaregivers #ARCHANGELS #WomenInLeadership #Healthcare #CaregiverSupport #AlexandraDrane

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 empowerment in a generation where very few professional doors were open to them. She began her career as a pediatric nurse at Johns Hopkins. On the floors, she saw everything in a single shift: early cases of congenital HIV, double lung transplants in young children, East Baltimore asthmatic exacerbations. And she kept asking the same question over and over again: why is healthcare organized this way? That single question became a career. From bedside nursing she moved into consulting, working on harmonizing clinical quality measures across NCQA, NQF, AMA and CMS, foundational work that paved the way for value-based care. She helped shape the policy framework that led to meaningful use and the electronic health record adoption wave. She joined Pfizer at the exact moment Lipitor was losing patent protection, watching 10 billion dollars in revenue evaporate in a single year while the entire pharma commercial model was rewritten around her. Today she is the Corporate Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft's Health & Life Sciences organization, leading at what she calls one of the few generational shifts in technology in her lifetime. In this episode of Inspiring Women, host Laurie McGraw sits down with Mary to talk about the arc from bedside nursing to Microsoft, from the Manila folder era of medicine to a Stanford pilot where AI agents now compress cancer treatment decisions from weeks and months down to days. They go deep on the AI that hundreds of thousands of physicians are already using today, why nurses describing themselves as "data entry analysts" broke something in her, and what it actually means to build technology that fades into the background instead of getting between a patient and the person caring for them. They discuss: - Growing up as the daughter of an immigrant nurse, and what nursing did for female empowerment in her mother's generation in India - Why she began her career at Johns Hopkins and the moment as a 24-year-old floor nurse that turned her into a systems thinker - The four-act arc of her career across nursing, policy, pharma and technology, and why every zig and zag felt rational at the time - Inside Pfizer during the Lipitor patent cliff, when one drug lost 10 billion dollars in revenue in a single year - Why healthcare still tolerates a digital experience nobody would accept from Uber, Venmo, or online banking - Dragon Copilot for physicians, and how it removes the keyboard from between doctor and patient - Dragon Copilot for nurses, and why nursing workflows demand a fundamentally different technology design - The physical, emotional and cognitive burden that AI is finally lifting off frontline clinicians - The Stanford multi-agent tumor board experiment compressing cancer treatment decisions from weeks to days - Why she refuses to be put in a box as clinician, operator, strategist or policy person, and what a lattice career actually looks like - What she means when she says she expects to remain intrepid for the next five years If you care about the future of healthcare, the real impact of AI on frontline workers, or what a non-linear career built across nursing, policy, pharma and tech actually looks like, this one is for you.

In this episode of Inspiring Women, Laurie McGraw speaks with Dr. Veronica Mallett, a physician, educator, and trailblazer with four decades of experience advancing health equity and workforce representation in American medicine. Dr. Mallett is Senior Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer of the More in Common Alliance, a 10-year, $100 million partnership between Morehouse School of Medicine and CommonSpirit Health created to expand representation in medicine and close the physician shortage in underserved communities. Dr. Mallett shares the story behind her drive, growing up in Detroit as the daughter of two educators and civil rights leaders, who taught her that education was "the great leveler" and that having a principle means being prepared to stand alone. She talks about deciding at age 9 to become a doctor, navigating Barnard College and medical training as one of very few women of color in the room, and learning to turn individual setbacks into collective action. In this conversation, Dr. Mallett discusses: - Why the More in Common Alliance is doubling the class size at Morehouse School of Medicine and building regional medical campuses and graduate medical education sites in underserved areas - The work happening in communities like Bakersfield and Kern County, California — one of the most medically underserved regions in the state - Why she believes the promise that women "can have it all" was a myth, and what to build instead: a real support system and intentional choices - Her case for leaning into leadership roles — and how the autonomy that comes with them benefits your family, not just your career - Managing a blended family of six children, and what work-life balance actually means in practice - Overcoming imposter syndrome at every level, and the mantra her sister gave her: "Who I am is enough" Dr. Mallett previously served as Senior Vice President of Health Affairs and Dean of the School of Medicine at Meharry Medical College, and as President and CEO of Meharry Medical College Ventures. Earlier in her career she helped launch a new medical school at Texas Tech University in El Paso. She is board certified in obstetrics and gynecology and in female pelvic medicine and reconstructive surgery, earned her medical degree at Michigan State University, and holds a master's in Medical Management from Carnegie Mellon University. Inspiring Women, hosted by Laurie McGraw, features candid conversations with women leaders about the choices, setbacks, and turning points behind their careers. Full conversation with Dr. Veronica Mallett on Inspiring Women.

Less than 2% of venture capital goes to female founders. When Laurie McGraw started Inspiring Women five years ago, the number was 2.4%. A few years later it had dropped to 1.8%. Absolute dollars going to women have grown, but the share of total capital has gone the other way, and the gap is now one of the largest unsolved problems in capital allocation. Laurie sits down with three women working to change that from inside the system. The guests: Ita Ekpoudom is a Partner at Gingerbread Capital, a family office fund started by a former co-chair of tech banking at Goldman Sachs who realized after retiring that she had never made a private investment in her entire career. Gingerbread now invests directly into female-founded and co-founded companies, and as an LP into majority women-led funds. Jenny Abramson is the Founder and Managing Partner of Rethink Impact, the largest fund in the country backing female CEOs across health, education, environment, and economic empowerment. Jenny was a tech CEO herself before founding Rethink in 2015. Her mother had run one of the earliest institutional funds backing women roughly twenty years before that, and the share of VC going to women was higher in her mother's era than in Jenny's. Erin Harkless Moore leads the investment platform at Pivotal Ventures, the organization founded by Melinda French Gates to advance women's power and influence. Pivotal pulls on three levers: philanthropy, policy and advocacy, and investing. Erin deploys capital both into next-generation fund managers as an LP and directly into early-stage companies across the care economy, women's health, and financial access. Topics covered: 01. The $648B care economy, larger than the pharmaceutical industry, and why Pivotal partnered with The Holding Company to size it 02. Maternal mental health, childcare infrastructure, elder care, and women's health as one connected market 03. The companies these funds are backing: Midi (the first unicorn in menopause), 7 Starling, Winnie, Wellthy, Bold, Spring Health, and Maven 04. How to spot category-creating founders before the rest of the market catches on 05. April Koh, Spring Health, and what it meant to see her on the cover of Time 06. Why "emerging manager" is the wrong label for funds like Rethink, Magnify Ventures, and Cherry Rock Capital 07. Stacy Brown-Philpot's path from early Google to Task Rabbit CEO to founding Cherry Rock Capital 08. The pattern-matching problem at the heart of venture capital 09. Why nine firms captured 50% of all venture capital raised last year 10. Gender-diverse teams, capital efficiency, and the data on returns 11. Who actually sits on investment committees at endowments, foundations, and pensions, and why many pension funds are already run by women 12. The great wealth transfer heading largely to women and what it means for financial services 13. Why most women change financial advisors after inheriting wealth 14. The Casa Dragones story, Berta Gonzalez, and the speed gap between male and female capital decisions 15. Donna Khan's research on prevention versus promotion questions and how investors interview female founders differently 16. The $5 to $6 trillion gender parity opportunity in entrepreneurship 17. Why women are twice as likely to invest in other women, and why that still is not enough 18. Practical advice for women ready to invest, lead, or fund the next wave Full episode on Inspiring Women. Subscribe for more conversations with the women shaping business, capital, and leadership. #InspiringWomen #VentureCapital #FemaleFounders #WomenInBusiness #Investing #CareEconomy #WealthTransfer