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Executive Team
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Carrie Shaw, MS
CEO & Founder
Carrie, a medical illustrator and health educator, has a particular interest in conveying the first-person perspective of vulnerable patient populations through virtual reality storytelling. After completing her master’s in Biomedical Visualization in 2016, she founded her company Embodied Labs, with the goal of revolutionizing the way health care providers, caregivers, and patients learn about human health.
Erin Washington, MLS
Co-Founder & Advisor
Erin has experience working in both higher education and the aging care space -- doing instructional and curricular design, and developing and innovating immersive technologies and experiences. Erin is excited about the unique ability of immersive experiences to engage learners, create actionable empathy, foster insight and understanding, and improve learning outcomes.
Thomas Leahy, BS
Operations & Co-Founder
Thomas wants to live in a world where people understand each other better, and knows virtual reality will help create this world. As a self-described Transhumanist, he finds joy in the moments when technology feels second-nature to people — and seeks to create more of them. Thomas specializes in human-computer interaction, with virtual space as his ultimate playground.
Anthony McCormick, CA, PMP, MAppFin, CCP
Fr. Chief Financial Officer
Anthony is a 26 year veteran of operational finance and accounting. After starting his career at Deloitte, Anthony moved on to leading high performance teams globally in a diverse range of roles and industries in Australia, UK, Canada and the United States. Anthony blends his technical skills with his passion for entrepreneurship and strategy execution to bring added value to the senior management team and in partnering the finance function with operations.
Sumanth Channabasappa
Chief Strategy & Technology Officer
Sumanth is an executive, entrepreneur & venture investor. He has ~20 years of combined experience with incubating impactful technologies, products and services, including global solutions with multi-billion dollar returns. His experiences have spanned mobile and internet technologies, telecom, cloud, cybersecurity, internet of things (IoT,) healthcare, smart cities and AR/VR experiences.
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Carrie Cusker, MS, RN
VP of Clinical Innovations
Carrie Cusker is an innovator in the aging space and a fervent advocate for older adults and their care partners. Carrie draws on her 26 years of nursing experience to create meaningful, immersive content that encompasses both the clinical and human aspects of healthcare. With Embodied Labs, Carrie continues to challenge the social construction of aging through unique learning design. She has lent her voice to multiple conferences and webinar panels in efforts to inform, inspire, and celebrate innovation in aging services.
Dr. Tonia Nguyen, OTD, OTR/L
Product Manager
Tonia, an occupational therapist by training, is a tech-for-good enthusiast passionate about transdisciplinary collaboration between healthcare, design, and technology professionals to innovate accessible health solutions across the lifespan. Her previous experiences include hospital, home health, DME consulting, and the senior living industry on an innovation team promoting technology adoption to enrich the lives of older adults. Tonia believes in the power of technology, especially XR, as a vehicle for facilitating engagement, understanding, and connection with each other.
Emily Smith
Director of Customer Success
For Emily Smith, it has always been about what human connections technology can enable.
Her clients at the International Olympic Committee were among the first to broadcast sports live on the internet across the world, connecting fans with their teams and with each other across time zones, enabling celebrations that didn't have to wait for an event to be rebroadcast in local time. The Toronto companies that attend the local AWE Nite TO meetups she co-produces create impressive mixed reality apps and platforms to make existing processes like sales and workforce training smoother, faster, or safer.
Her clients at the International Olympic Committee were among the first to broadcast sports live on the internet across the world, connecting fans with their teams and with each other across time zones, enabling celebrations that didn't have to wait for an event to be rebroadcast in local time. The Toronto companies that attend the local AWE Nite TO meetups she co-produces create impressive mixed reality apps and platforms to make existing processes like sales and workforce training smoother, faster, or safer.
Haiden McGill
XR Program Manager
Haiden McGill is a creative technologist working at the intersection of product + business development for emerging technology startups, with an emphasis in XR training applications, real-time data, and interaction design. They are passionate about building experiential training that bridges the gap between elder and caregiver, and is instrumental towards providing empathetic, human-centered care. Looking forward, their goal is to continue to prioritize the democratization of immersive technologies while building experiences that allow for immersive, synchronous learning environments.
Yasmine de Aranda
Head of Marketing
Yasmine leverages her 20+ years of customer-centric marketing, advertising agency, and business development experience to help B2B SaaS organizations scale. Her growth marketing frameworks help turn vision into executable marketing roadmaps prioritized by business impact.
Fueled to be in service to others, she volunteers at her children's school, and mentors disruptive tech startups with Tech2Impact and GrowthMentor.com - helping them find their beacon positioning and align product roadmap, services, marketing, sales, and customer success for sustained growth. She joined the advisory board of PeopleBeforePatients with a mission to humanize healthcare.
Past & Current Advisors
Olu Ajilore, MD, PhD
Clinical Advisor
Dr. Ajilore is a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and an alum of Stanford, Harvard, and UCLA studying VR-based intervention in health.
Neelum Aggarwal, MD
Clinical Advisor
Dr. Aggarwal is a Professor in the Departments of Neurological Sciences | Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center, Research Director at the Rush Heart Center for Women Cardiology Cognitive Clinic and Course Co- Director for the Rush Innovation in Medicine Course at Rush Medical College.
Daniel Potts, MD, FAAN
Clinical Advisor
Dr. Potts, a neurologist, is founder and President of Cognitive Dynamics Foundation, a non-profit with arts-based programs such as Bringing Art to Life which facilitate quality of life improvement and relationship-building in persons living with dementia. He is also an acclaimed author of numerous books about Alzheimer’s.
William Hazzard, MD
Clinical Advisor
Known as one of the “founding fathers of geriatrics”, Dr. Hazzard is a professor in the Department of Internal Medicine for Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine at the Wake Forest School of Medicine.