Host Monique T. Marshall speaks with Sanjana Gurram and Pooja Patel, co-founders of EquiPad, about their effort to make safer, more sustainable menstrual products widely available in schools, workplaces, and other institutional spaces. Their work combines materials innovation with a systems-level approach to access: developing bio-based pads and tampons from agricultural waste fibers while designing dispensers and distribution models around the realities of facilities, budgets, and public policy. What would it mean to treat menstrual care as essential public infrastructure rather than a private inconvenience? The conversation explores period poverty, chemical exposure, supply-chain transparency, FDA approval, and the challenges of bringing a new biomaterial to market. Sanjana and Pooja also reflect on the role of customer discovery in shaping EquiPad's evolution—and why building better products begins with understanding the full ecosystem in which they will be used.

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Sanjana Gurram

I'm Sanjana Gurram, co-founder and CTO of EquiPad. I'm a materials engineer and researcher currently getting my Masters in Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University, where I'm exploring opportunities to advance our materials R&D through Gotham Foundry.

I've always been driven by the convergence of human and environmental health. Studying environmental science and human biology at the same time in high school made it clear to me that the health of our bodies is deeply contingent on the health of the planet, and that medical practice carries a significant environmental footprint. That realization has shaped everything I've pursued since. At UC Berkeley, I worked in the Xu Group on embedding enzymes into soft plastics to yield recyclable oligomers, using biology and protein modeling to optimize degradation. I love working with sustainable materials to solve problems at the intersection of human and environmental health.

While at Berkeley, I enrolled in Deplastify the Planet, where I met my co-founder Pooja Patel. We worked with a bandage company to prototype a 100% biobased bandage, and that work turned our attention to menstrual care. When I dug into what's actually in pads and tampons, I found that the products I grew up using were by mass about 90% plastic. The lack of transparency around products that stay on or in your body for a week out of every month is by design, and it disproportionately affects people who don't have the luxury to question it.

That's what led Pooja and me to build EquiPad. As CTO, I lead our materials R&D, developing a low-resource, adaptable process to convert agricultural waste fibers into pad and tampon components, and a cellulose-based superabsorbent polymer as a safer alternative to the polyacrylamide-based SAPs currently used in menstrual products.

Pooja Patel

Pooja Patel is the co-founder and CEO of EquiPad. She is a sustainable product developer who holds a Masters in Development Practice at UC Berkeley, where she met Sanjana. She leads product development of dispensers for EquiPad, working at the intersection of sustainability, public health, and human-centered design. Together with Sanjana, they are working towards building solutions that make menstrual care more accessible, equitable, and environmentally responsible in public spaces. With a background in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering with a focus on human factors and over 15 years of community service project experience, Pooja brings a systems and community-driven approach to solving complex challenges. Her experience spans climate tech, social impact, sustainable product development (from prototyping to production), equitable design, and designing for user adoption and scaling in low-resource settings, fueling her mission to create products and infrastructure that improve everyday health outcomes while advancing environmental sustainability.

What happens when a community spends years building relationships, knowledge, and value on a platform it does not control? Host Monique T. Marshall speaks with D'Angelo Senat, founder and CEO of AllPeeP, about rethinking online community infrastructure around ownership, privacy, and long-term trust. AllPeeP gives organizations greater control over their member relationships, data, and digital environments, while its open-source initiative, OpenPeeps, aims to make that infrastructure more flexible and accessible to community builders. The conversation moves from open-source technology and AI-assisted matchmaking to customer discovery, enterprise sales, and the challenge of building software around the real needs of institutions and their members. D'Angelo Senat also reflects on the relationships and ecosystems that shaped his own entrepreneurial path—and why, in both technology and business, meaningful growth often moves at the speed of trust.

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D'Angelo Senat is the Founder and CEO of AllPeeP and Co-Founder of OpenPeeps, platforms focused on helping organizations and builders own and control their digital communities and infrastructure. Rooted in the belief that community is the foundation of progress, D'Angelo built AllPeeP to give leaders, founders, and nonprofits trusted spaces for connection, collaboration, and growth free from the limits of traditional social platforms that control your data and IP. Through OpenPeeps, he is expanding that vision into open-source, self-hosted infrastructure that empowers developers and communities to build on their own terms.

Since launching in 2022, D'Angelo has grown AllPeeP into a rising force in the community-tech space, earning recognition as a Black Ambition Prize Winner and Ambassador while supporting a network of over 1,000 founders within the Black Ambition ecosystem alone. Today, AllPeeP is on track to onboard more than 100,000 members across customer communities worldwide, helping organizations build ecosystems they truly own.

An engineer by training and builder by nature, D'Angelo combines his background in Industrial and Systems Engineering with a passion for inclusive innovation and long-term systems thinking. Backed by Harvard Innovation Labs, NBC South Florida, and Miami Tech Works, his journey reflects the power of resilience, ownership, and purpose-driven leadership, proving that when you build with community at the center, scale naturally follows.

Screen time is often viewed as something to limit—but what if it could also become an opportunity to build emotional awareness, resilience, and connection? In this episode, Host Monique T. Marshall speaks with Dr. Melissa Cesarano, co-founder of ThinkHumanTV, about a venture that combines cognitive science, storytelling, and interactive technology to help children and families develop emotional literacy through the media they already enjoy. Together, they discuss the research behind ThinkHumanTV's innovative learning platform, the role of schools, educators, families, and content creators in shaping its development, and the challenges of bringing an evidence-based educational technology to market. Along the way, we hear about Dr. Cesarano's journey from poet and cognitive scientist to entrepreneur, offering thoughtful insights on leadership, resilience, and creating technology that strengthens our shared humanity.

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Dr. Melissa Cesarano is a cognitive scientist, professor, and cofounder of ThinkHumanTV (Affectifi Inc). She received her BA in Cognitive Science with a minor in poetry from the University of Pennsylvania. Mel also received her Masters of Education and Ph.D. in cognitive science from Columbia University, where she co-created and teaches a course on the cognitive foundations of emotional literacy. Mel has over a decade of experience in curriculum design and education consulting. She's also a college admissions coach, yogi, and a trained comedic actor and writer.