WomenX on the Frontlines

We are back again with Kristin Myers, an award winning journalist, Editor in Chief of the Balance and former Yahoo Finance Anchor. Kristin will lead our latest course HerWealth which launchs the first week of February.Last episode, she explained GameStop to us so that we understood who the players were, what actually happened, and how a similar debacle might be avoided in the future. The one question that we have left about Gamestop is: where were the women voices?In this episode we talk to Kristin about how we might use the markets and investing to our advantage. Kristin shares what it takes to make a smart investment and how to avoid uninformed risks like what happened in GameStop.

In today's episode we take you back a year ago when we were living through the height of the pandemic with millions of people working from home and retail stores struggling to keep their doors open. As this was happening we watched a retail company with little promise take the market by surprise. In just a few days shares of the video game retailer, GameStop soared 1,700 percent. To help us understand how and why, we reached out to expert Kristin Myers the award winning journalist, Editor in Chief of the Balance and former Yahoo Finance Anchor.Kristin will be leading our latest course HerWealth which will launch the first week of February.In the next two episodes you will hear Kristin break down the facts to help us understand the markets and the various players that caused this market frenzy. 

In this episode, we reflect on all of our COVID conversations and what they have taught us about accessing science to become better agents of our own decisions. We reference our conversation with Dr. Janina Jeff, an amazing science communicator and geneticist from New Orleans, Louisiana, at the beginning of the pandemic where she shared with us how COVID changed the game for science research and access to the medical community. She also helps us better understand the genetic makeup of the COVID providing the foundation for us to interpret all of the data and trends we have followed throughout the pandemic. With her keen knowledge of history, culture, and science, Dr. Janina shares why there was so much mistrust and misinformation surrounding this virus and the vaccine.  Dr. Janina Jeff has a Ph.D. in Human/Medical Genetics from Vanderbilt University. She also received a Master's degree in Applied Statistics from Vanderbilt University and a Bachelor's degree in Biology and Spanish minor from Spelman. After her Ph.D., she pursued postdoctoral training in the labs of Eimear Kenny, Ph.D. and Erwin Bottinger, MD at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research career was focused on population genetics, specifically studying complex and admixed populations (descendants with African ancestry) and discovering population-specific genetic risk factors of common disease. The launch of her podcast, "In Those Genes," won Spotify's Sounds Up Boot Camp. Episodes can be found on Spotify, Apple, and all major podcasting apps.

In this episode, we want to get to the science of vaccine efficacy. Now that we know how the COVID virus works and spreads (thanks to Dr. Blazer), we seek to understand why the vaccines are effective and how they offer us protection even in the face of mutations.  For help with these questions, we reached out to infectious disease expert Dr. Abir Hussein, a physician on the frontlines in Seattle, Washington. 

In this episode, we take a step back from all of the information (and misinformation) on the COVID virus and related vaccines and try to understand the hard science behind this pandemic. mRNA is key to understanding the science behind COVID-19. We reach out to Dr. Ashira Blazer a rheumatologist on the frontlines in New York City. This episode covers two conversations that we had with Dr. Blazer in December 2020 and February 2021. We hope you learn as much as we did!