Category Archives for Writers’ Rough Drafts

Writers’ Rough Drafts – Episode #51 With Heidi Gardner

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Heidi Gardner is a scientist, researcher, blogger, entrepreneur, and activist. While her “full-time gig” is as a research fellow at the Health Services Research Unit at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, after receiving her bachelor’s degree in pharmacology and her doctorate in participant recruitment, she has a lot more going on besides her fascination and love affair with science and improving participant trial experience.

This year, Heidi embarked on an international odyssey as a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust fellow—visiting art installations, chatting to professors and female scientists, and reading tomes upon tomes worth of articles and literature in North America, Europe, and Asia—to find interesting and unique ways that people share scientific research and results so it is more accessible to, and engaging for, the general public. A regular blogger herself, she updates her site with posts not only about her work and pursuits, but also her life as a woman in science and as a human on planet Earth. Which is part of her “side hustle,” an Etsy store and ecommerce brand called “Science on a Postcard,” a fun project that helps to see science in a new light.

Writers’ Rough Drafts – Episode #50 With Carrie McKeegan

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Carrie McKeegan is an energetic business leader, a mom, and a global citizen who also happens to love to write. She is the co-founder and CEO of Greenback Expat Tax Services, a company she started over a decade ago with her husband David, after they recognized a serious lack in the market for tax services specifically designed for American expats. With an undergraduate degree in Political Science and an International Master in Business degree, Carrie spent the first decade of her professional career working in financial institutions around the world, like American Express and Barclaycard.

Greenback Expat Tax Services has been named to the Inc. 5000 list and featured in countless publications, like the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CNBC, and Bloomberg. When Carrie realized that she was having more conversations and getting more press requests to share how she and David successfully manage a 100 percent remote team of over 40 people, she took the big scary leap to pitch herself to a major business site as a Contributor. On her first try, she landed a column on Inc., and the rest—as they say—is history.

Writers’ Rough Drafts – Episode #49 With Alex Proaps

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Alex Proaps is a design psychologist, consultant, entrepreneur, professor, and speaker. She uses what she knows about human perception and cognition to help design and development teams who create human-centered technology. This means that, while a lot of her writing is extremely academic and technical, she often needs to write and present in a way that takes these very high-level concepts and processes and breaks them down into easy-to-understand conversations.

Due to the nature of her work, and her location in Norfolk, Virginia, Alex ends up working on a lot of classified and NDA-laden projects, where she serves as a conduit between different teams and departments to make the whole thing come together in a way that serves the end user. When she’s not getting super techy and applying human psychology to the user experience, she still gets her creative juices flowing with occasional blog posts and “fun” articles, and her online Etsy shop, which prominently features some pretty shiny pieces, with a heavy focus on dinosaurs and robots.

Writers’ Rough Drafts – Episode #48 With Jay Acunzo

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Jay Acunzo is a public speaker, the author of the book Break the Wheel: Question Best Practices, Hone Your Intuition, and Do Your Best Work, a critically acclaimed show and podcast host, as well as the founder of Unthinkable Media, which creates documentary shows with brand clients. In the earlier parts of his career, he worked as a digital media strategist at Google, was Head of Content at HubSpot, and was Vice President of Brand at the venture capital firm NextView. He’s also the writer behind one of my favorite new-to-me newsletters of 2018, Damn the Best Practices.