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The Prepare.ai Podcast
The Prepare.ai Podcast
Author: http://Prepare.ai
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© 2025 The Prepare.ai Podcast
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The Prepare.ai Podcast explores the fast-paced world of emerging tech from the landscape of the Midwest, with a distinctly non-coastal vibe. Hosted by technologists Fully Teasdale and Dave Costenaro, the Prepare.ai Podcast highlights great work across artificial intelligence and machine learning, data science at scale, virtual reality and augmented reality, and robotics and robotic process automation, and features folks from boots-on-the-ground implementers to vision-creating founders. The Podcast is produced by Prepare.ai, a 501c3 whose mission is to increase collaboration around 4th-industrial revolution technologies in order to advance the human experience. We’re doing it from the heart of the Midwest, where the 1st- and 2nd-industrial revolutions brought growth and innovation, and where the 3rd eroded jobs and urban landscapes. This time, we will not be left behind. We will lead, not follow. Help us Prepare.
34 Episodes
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Dr. Jason Keune is the executive director of St. Louis University’s Bander Center for Medical Business Ethics, established in 2007 to promote ethical business practices in medicine and healthcare. Dr. Keune is also an assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. He performs abdominal and gastrointestinal surgeries and conducts research on biomedical ethics, medical business ethics and social justice. He received both his undergraduate an...
Sanmay Das is a professor of Computer Science at George Mason University. From 2013-2020, he was on the faculty of the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also founded and served as the first chair of the steering committee of the Division of Computational and Data Sciences. Dr. Das received his Ph.D. from MIT and a Bachelor's degree from Harvard, both in Computer Science. He is chair of the Association for Computing Machinery Special Inte...
George Leno Holmes Jr is the co-founder and CEO of Hire Henry, a robotic lawn-mowing startup that is growing and evolving rapidly in the heartland of the United States. George received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, focusing on the intersection of human-robot interaction, mechatronic design, and robotics. George leads the development of the company's R&D plan, strategic milestones, intellectual property protection, company formati...
Serial entrepreneur Paul Powers co-founded Physna in 2015 to bridge the gap between software and the physical world by normalizing 3D data and applying machine learning to it. Physna's proprietary technology is patent-pending in over 120 countries and is used in cybersecurity, protecting the integrity of 3D designs in aerospace, automotive, medical devices, and other industries from otherwise untraceable manipulations & cyber attacks. Physna technology, which can compare and analyze milli...
William Yeoh is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and a co-director of the Division of Computational and Data Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests are in optimization, heuristic search, and planning under uncertainty, especially in the context of multi-agent systems. He is an NSF CAREER recipient and was named in IEEE's AI's 10-to-Watch list in 2015. He currently serves on the editorial board of the Artificial Intell...
Amanda Clifton is Staff Vice President, Technical Product Ownership at Centene Corporation, a publicly traded managed care company based in St. Louis, MO that serves as an intermediary for government-sponsored and privately insured healthcare programs. Centene was ranked 24th on the Fortune 500 list in 2021 with 2020 revenues exceeding $111 billion. Amanda has been with Centene for 10 years, rising through the ranks from Senior Auditor to Director of Provider Data Management and then Senior D...
Serial entrepreneur Dheeraj Patri is the former CTO of Label Insight, a product metadata platform Dheeraj and his partners cofounded in 2008 which became a market-leading database of more than 200k product nutrients, 400k product ingredients and more than 9 million product attributes when it was acquired by NielsonIQ in May of 2021. In November of 2021 Dheeraj announced that he was joining the leadership team at Inclusively, a technology-centered inclusion solution and employment platform for...
Jason Carter is the founder and President of UNCOMN, an industry-leading B2B management and technology consulting provider he founded after serving 20 years in the US Navy after retiring as a commander in 2009. Jason’s Navy highlights include being onboard for a submerged collision with a Russian submarine, playing a key role in the largest maritime drug bust in US history; fighting fires in the Pentagon on 9/11; being the USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN flag communications officer responsible for Presid...
Sherea Dunlop is Executive Director of Create a Loop, a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing computer science instruction to students in the Saint Louis Metropolitan area, including students from low income backgrounds, who have little to no access or are otherwise underrepresented in the field of computer science. A graduate of Hood College with a master’s degree in from the University of Maryland College Park, Sherea has taught in 4 dramatically different elementary and secon...
Bronwyn Morgan is a FAA certified drone pilot, FAA Safety Representative and FAA Drone Pro, and is the Founder of Xeo Air, an AI based drones on demand, data analytics and autonomy platform for mission management that connects B2B clients in telecom, catastrophic response, oil and gas, energy, construction, civil infrastructure. She is also Founder of Airversity Drone Academy + Consulting, a professional drone pilot training school for both Part 107 exam prep and drone flight and private and ...
Dr. Brian Gant is assistant professor of cybersecurity at Maryville University, where he oversees the university’s undergraduate cyber program. Brian has been in cyber security for nearly two decades, including working as a cybersecurity threat specialist at BJC Healthcare, a Postal Inspector for the United States Postal Service, a Special Agent in the US Secret Service and an Intelligence Analyst for the FBI. Brian received his Doctorate in higher education leadership from Maryville Un...
Fully and Dave interview Rob Carpenter, a serial entrepreneur and passionate technologist. Rob is the CEO and Founder of Valyant AI, the first Artificially Intelligent “Digital Employee” that works directly alongside employees in customer facing roles. Valyant’s AI “Holly” works in fast food restaurants to greet customers at the drive-thru post, answer questions, and take food orders. Rob was named one of the top 25 most influential young professionals in Colorado by ColoradoBiz Magazine in 2...
Erica Barnell is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Geneoscopy Inc., a clinical-stage diagnostic company working on early detection of colorectal cancer. Its technology analyzes RNA in stool samples to look for early warning signs of cancer, providing a non-invasive alternative to colonoscopies. Geneoscopy raised a $6.9m Series A in 2019; in 2020, its diagnostic device was awarded Breakthrough Device Designation from the FDA and Erica was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30, and in 2021 a p...
Jason Bull is Chief Technology Officer of Benson Hill, a St. Louis-based food tech company unlocking the natural genetic diversity of plants thru its cutting-edge food innovation engine. Jason leads the company’s combined R&D and Data Science capabilities across predictive breeding, genomics, product discovery, big data engineering and software development. Prior to joining Benson Hill, he served as VP, Strategy & Machine Learning at Object Computing, Inc. and before that spent ...
Marc Bernstein is Founder & CEO of Balto, a real-time guidance tool for contact centers. Powered by AI, Balto listens to both sides of a conversation and visually prompts agents with the best things to say, live on every call. Marc also hosts Reimagining the Contact Center, a podcast that digs into the new contact center economy and how technology, businesses, and the modern customer work together for better outcomes. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Marc has both founded...
Vidya Setlur is Principal Research Scientist and Research Manager at Tableau Software, a leading data visualization company acquired by Salesforce in 2019, where she focuses on natural language processing and computer graphics. Vidya earned her PhD in Computer Graphics in 2005 at Northwestern University; the goal of her work is to develop new computer algorithms and user interfaces that enhance visual communication and understanding of the semantics of the underlying data. Her research combin...
Paul Mensah, PhD leads the Bioprocess R&D and Drug Substance Supply group in Pfizer’s BioTherapeutics Pharmaceutical Sciences organization, with sites in Andover MA, Chapel Hill, NC, and St. Louis, MO. The group is responsible for developing innovative and compliant manufacturing processes for biotherapeutics, including gene therapy and vaccines such as the Covid19 vaccine. As head of the group, Paul oversees the scientific and operational implementation plans for all aspects of bioprocess te...
Dr. Melvin Greer is Chief Data Scientist for the Americas at Intel Corporation. He is responsible for building Intel’s data science platform through graph analytics, machine learning and cognitive computing to accelerate transformation of data into a strategic asset for Public Sector and commercial enterprises. His systems and software engineering experience has resulted in patented inventions in Cloud Computing, Synthetic Biology and IoT Bio-sensors for edge analytics. He functions as ...
Mitra Goswami is Senior Director of Data Science & Machine Learning at PagerDuty, an incident management platform that provides notifications, automated escalations and other functionality to help teams detect and fix infrastructure problems quickly. Mitra has also worked in Astrophysics, Media, Marketing tech and Financial Services with organizations including Credit Suisse and Capgemini. Mitra holds a PhD in Astrophysics and an Masters in Physics from Northwestern University as well as ...
Kristin Dennis is Chief Operating Officer of Impossible Sensing, a St. Louis-based company that develops next-generation sensing applications for deployment in extreme terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments. They developed two laser spectroscopy systems for the Mars Perseverance Rover and are currently collaborating with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and SETI on a deep ocean mission. Before joining Impossible Sensing, Kristin spent many years working in surgical ocular recovery for transpl...



