The quest for a problem worth solving
In this alumni episode of the Imagine A World podcast, Eli Cahan (2019 cohort) sits down with Ileana Pirozzi (2018 cohort), who imagines a world where the quality of surgery can be democratized everywhere.
Ileana traces her journey from growing up in a family of tobacco farmers in southern Italy to attending a United World College in the Netherlands, and then Brown University in the United States. She reflects on how a tumor diagnosis during her freshman year drew her toward cancer research and, eventually, healthcare more broadly.
Ileana discusses her search for a problem worth dedicating herself to, and the courage it took to commit when the right opportunity appeared, even amid tremendous uncertainty. She speaks about how her time as a Knight-Hennessy scholar taught her patience and the value of sitting with the unknown. That willingness to embrace uncertainty, she shares, gave rise to a desire to connect more deeply with her fellow scholars, which she formalized into what is now a Knight-Hennessy Scholars tradition: Deep Dive.
Resources
Guest
Ileana Pirozzi, from Colleferro (Roma), Italy, is pursuing a PhD in bioengineering at Stanford School of Engineering. At Brown University, she earned a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering and biomedical engineering. Ileana was a research intern at the NASA Ames Research Center and at the Tripathi Biomedical Engineering Lab at Brown. She was elected president of the Rhode Island Alpha Chapter of Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honors society. Additionally, she was named a Vincent and Ruby DiMase Research Fellow at Brown’s School of Engineering and was a recipient of the K.T. Romer Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award.
Imagine A World team
Imagine A World's theme music was composed and recorded by Taylor Goss (2021 cohort). The podcast was originally conceived and led by Briana Mullen (2020 cohort), Taylor Goss, and Willie Thompson (2022 cohort), along with Daniel Gajardo (2020 cohort) and Jordan Conger (2020 cohort).
Knight-Hennessy scholars represent a vast array of cultures, perspectives, and experiences. While we as an organization are committed to elevating their voices, the views expressed are those of the scholars, and not necessarily those of KHS.
Full transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.
Ileana Pirozzi:
In my freshman year, I was diagnosed with a tumor. I was in a new country, thousands of miles away from home, and it was scary and difficult, but I was so lucky to be in the country with some of the most advanced healthcare options in the world. It sort of hit me that there was a reason that I was there and that the clinical trial that I was a part of was happening near Brown.
And for that reason, I started my career in cancer diagnostics and sort of had to bumble around healthcare to figure out where I really needed to be, but I knew that it had to be a place where I was doing something good for people.
My name is Ileana. I imagine a world where the quality of surgery can be democratized for everywhere.
Willie Thompson:
Welcome to the alumni edition of the Imagine A World Podcast from Knight-Hennessy Scholars. We are here to give you a glimpse of Knight-Hennessy scholars who have graduated and are making a difference in the world through their personal and professional endeavors.
In each episode, we talk with KH alumni about the world they imagine and what they're doing to bring it to life.
Today you'll hear from Ileana Pirozzi, a member of the 2018 cohort. In this episode, Ileana reflects on experimenting with multiple majors in college, following her curiosity at the intersection of entrepreneurship, healthcare, and engineering, how she makes difficult choices, and so much more.
Eli Cahan:
Hello everybody, and welcome back to Imagine World Alumni Edition. We are thrilled to have another amazing guest with us here today. Ileana Pirozzi, thank you so much for joining, coming after a very busy day that I will make fun of you about later. I was just hearing before we started recording. Anyway, Ileana goes without introduction, but we will get through part of her journey. Ileana, thanks for joining us.
Ileana Pirozzi:
Thanks for having me. So my name is Ileana. I was a member of the 2018 cohort and a degree, well, a PhD in bioengineering. So I imagine a world where surgical expertise becomes as scalable as software is and where the best surgical knowledge in the world can be embedded in the tools that our surgeons are using so that every patient can benefit from it, regardless of where they're treated, who is in the room or their access to care. So I imagine a world where the quality of surgery can be democratized for everywhere.
Eli Cahan:
Great. Our second pioneer cohort person working on surgery. Bingyi Wang. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you guys are so much fun.
Ileana Pirozzi:
Yes. And she happens to be one of my best friends.
Eli Cahan:
And she happens to be one of your best friends. I don't know. I don't know what you guys were drinking on campus, but it was something. Something was running through the water. Why don't we start by telling us just a little bit about your journey and everything that took you to Stanford, and then we will get into what you did at Stanford later, but how did you end up there?
Ileana Pirozzi:
I don't know, but I can tell you where I came from. I come from a family of tobacco farmers in Southern Italy. I grew up in a small town outside of Rome, but I actually left that town, and my family, and my country when I was 15 years old. It's a long story, not too dissimilar for Bingyi's, but involves a boy and scholarship and an artificial island in the Netherlands with a moat around it.
Eli Cahan:
Wow. This is a HBO six-part series. This is great!
Ileana Pirozzi:
Yes. For next time.
Eli Cahan:
For next time. Oh, for the sequel!
Ileana Pirozzi:
For the sequel. But I went to Brown University for my undergrad, faced a major health challenge in my freshman year and decided then to dedicate my entire career to healthcare and healthcare technology specifically. So I came to Stanford because it's one of the few places where medicine, engineering, and entrepreneurship are really converging. And I was really fascinated with the idea that technology could fundamentally change how medicine is practiced. And that's how I got there.
Eli Cahan:
That is incredible. Let's unpack the various pieces of it. I won't ask you his name. I'm tempted. I'm tempted. Just so we can hunt him down or mock him for making me-
Ileana Pirozzi:
I mean, frankly, I'm not sure I can remember.
Eli Cahan:
Oh, wow. Wow. That is a dagger. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. She is literally brushing the dirt off her shoulder. You went to a special high school that we've heard about before, a different reason, but we've heard about before on the alumni podcast.
Can you tell us a little bit about where you went to high school and how that maybe molded the way your brain was wired a little bit for when you set off for Brown?
Ileana Pirozzi:
Well, I went to a high school called United World College, or UWC. We actually don't refer to it as a high school. We refer to it as a movement, but people think we're a cult when we say that.
Eli Cahan:
Does sound a little suss.
Ileana Pirozzi:
We are fine with high school. But it was a school founded by a group of philosophers and anthropologists during the Cold War with the idea that education could be the force to unite people from different backgrounds while they're still malleable enough to recognize that our similarities are stronger than our differences. So it was a very optimistic place to be. It also was a place that gave an opportunity to people that otherwise would never have had it. It was perhaps a bigger bubble than the Silicon Valley.
Eli Cahan:
Hard to imagine. Hard to imagine that. So you go to this cult and then you leave, and then you end up at Brown. What did you think you were going to study when you got to Brown? And to the extent you want to talk about the things you went through at Brown, how did that change your mind?
Ileana Pirozzi:
Yeah. Well, I went to Brown, I mean, frankly, because they gave me a full scholarship and some, but I also went to Brown because of the open curriculum. So I didn't know what I wanted to study, to my mother's disappointment. I liked physics, chemistry, biology, and math. So it was probably going to be some kind of science.
But in my freshman year, I was diagnosed with a tumor. I was in a new country, thousands of miles away from home, and it was scary and difficult, but I was so lucky to be in the country with some of the most advanced healthcare options in the world. And it sort of hit me that there was a reason that I was there and that the clinical trial that I was a part of was happening near Brown. For that reason, I started my career in cancer diagnostics and sort of had to bumble around healthcare to figure out where I really needed to be, but I knew that it had to be a place where I was doing something good for people.
Eli Cahan:
Yeah. It's unbelievably inspiring and yet horrifying thing that you would've had to experience this at such an age. And I'm sorry you went through that. Obviously, what you've done since, which we'll talk about has been an enormous gift to the world. But as someone who has treated kids with cancer, no one deserves that. So I'm sorry that you went through that.
As you sort of evolved in your studies at Brown, going through the things you went through in your personal life, how did the future begin to take shape for you in your mind? What did you think you were going to do? Where did you think you were going to go after that chapter?
Ileana Pirozzi:
I mean, the truth is that I had no idea. I think I was following my curiosity, but I was also following the advice of people that I thought might have good judgment. I was the first person in my family to go to college and grad school didn't really mean anything to me. In fact, it meant more financial strain for me and my family. So it was actually really difficult to justify to my parents why I was not going to take a job instead. But I think Brown just afforded me the opportunity to try things out, and that sort of intellectual sandbox environment is something that I craved and that I looked for at Stanford as well. I just had to find, again, the right place in healthcare, but I knew that applying technology to moving the needle for human health is what I wanted to do.
And every experience I had helped me refine my place on that map.
Eli Cahan:
How did grad school come into the picture? How did it evolve from something that was going to be a delay to starting the rest of your life and certainly to beginning to make money to support yourself? And in your contemplating grad school, when did Stanford come on the map?
Ileana Pirozzi:
Yeah, so I met a man in my undergrad, a professor, Anubhav Tripathi, at Brown, and he took me in his lab. I was 17 years old. I had just found out about my diagnosis, and I was like, "I want to learn about cancer and I want to in fact develop diagnostics for cancer." And his research was funded by industry. So it felt like it was real research versus some of the other things I had been exposed to until that point. And he believed in me before I knew there was anything to believe in. I find that to be something that really nurtured my soul and that I tried to fast-forward, but I didn't know I was a good researcher or not. I was just interested in the problems. But he told me about Stanford. He told me about the biodesign program at Stanford and Paul Yock and Steve Quake.
And he honestly had a little bit of an obsession with Stanford. He wanted to make Brown an entrepreneurial school as much as Stanford was. And maybe if he's listening to this episode, maybe I'll send it to him. He actually started the company now, and he's doing it. I mean, he's really taking that entrepreneurial spirit to campus. Brown is a much smaller school. It's a lot more focused on teaching and education, but I think the dedication to curiosity is actually the seed for innovation at the end of the day, so he might not have been wrong. But really, that was the seed for any interest in Stanford.
Other than that, it was even further from home. So my parents were even more unhappy about that. But of course, the other thing I came across with Stanford was the Knight-Hennessy program. John Hennessy actually personally came to Brown the first year to advertise the program.
And I happened to be in the area of campus and saw a poster about it. And it reminded me of the UWC. It reminded me of that poster that I had seen 10 years earlier about, are you aged between 15 and 17 and want to change the world? And something they tell us when we graduate UWC is that you never really graduate, you just find more UWCs in the world, more opportunities to be optimistic and to try to shape the world in the direction that you want to see it go. And I felt like Knight-Hennessy was another opportunity to do that.
Eli Cahan:
You were looking for your next cult.
Ileana Pirozzi:
Yeah!
Eli Cahan:
That's great. It's amazing how much of your life has been determined by posters on the sidewalk, I guess, of various-
Ileana Pirozzi:
The first one was on a bus.
Eli Cahan:
Okay, on a bus. Yeah, that's way more dignified. So, eventually you end up in the first cohort of Knight-Hennessy. Can you maybe talk a little bit about the work you're doing now? And then we can sort of put that in perspective with what you learned in Knight-Hennessy. Can you share the work you've done since graduating, and we can learn a little bit about that as a way of thinking about what role the second cult in your life played?
Ileana Pirozzi:
I spent my time at Stanford doing some more bumbling around, trying to find what I really cared about. I felt a little bit empty without an answer to that question. What do I really care about? I'm not the kind of person that can take a job to be a job, unfortunately.
Eli Cahan:
I know that feeling.
Ileana Pirozzi:
And when that happens to you, it's really hard to not find that thing that you care about. So I hoped that my PhD would give me an answer to that, and that I'd find a field, a technology, a company that I wanted to help build, but that didn't happen. So, after Stanford, I continued to follow my curiosity. I tried to optimize for maximizing my learning, and I genuinely wanted to be swooned by some problem, and I had three criteria for that problem.
One is that it should unequivocably help people, which is actually not trivial in technology. The second is that it should solve a real problem. And the third is that it should be something that I should have some unique connection and insight with. At no point was this a requirement for me starting a company or that company. But I actually ended up going into investing after spending some time in startups because I realized that it was the only job where I could be paid to learn and to bumble around some more.
So I did that for a few years and I ended up meeting some incredible people, learning about a lot of new and different fields, ended up raising my own fund. I thought I would be doing that for the next 10, 15 years, and my investors thought that as well. Maybe that's another conversation.
Eli Cahan:
The third episode.
Ileana Pirozzi:
The third-
Eli Cahan:
[inaudible 00:14:58] episode after the Netherlands, man.
Ileana Pirozzi:
That never was.
Eli Cahan:
There never was. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah.
Ileana Pirozzi:
And whose name is forgotten.
Eli Cahan:
Well, yeah, maybe. I'm growing less convinced the more times we mentioned him that you've forgotten him. But anyway, go on.
Ileana Pirozzi:
Yeah. So okay. The second part of the question was what I...
Eli Cahan:
Obviously, there is something deeply stimulating about spending your life learning from different highly ambitious people in the venture capital world and in the investing world. Can you share a little bit more about kind of-
Ileana Pirozzi:
I love that. I actually didn't say venture capital, but it was implied.
Eli Cahan:
Listen, here we are. We are who we are. We live where we live. What was it about that that just didn't do it for you? And then I know you're in a very sensitive stage of the work you're doing now, so I will not ask you many questions about it because I know you got to respect the stealth in the Bay, but what pushed you to move in that direction?
Ileana Pirozzi:
Number one, the person that I had to do it with. I met my co-founder at Stanford. I also met my husband at Stanford, and they're not the same person.
Eli Cahan:
That sounds healthy. Yeah,
Ileana Pirozzi:
She's my other half in my professional life, which honestly is a large part of my life. And the opportunity to build something with her was always very alluring. The second part of that question is that in my quest and my bumbling around until I hit something I cared about, I always up until this point felt that I was either late to a trend or in the midst of the wave, and I really wanted to find a moment where I feel ahead on the wave. And that has only happened with recent developments in technology.
It's the first time that I felt like I had an insight that I actually had to act upon. And when you feel like you have found some sort of secret that somehow the world doesn't know about yet, suddenly the cost of not doing that becomes higher than the cost of leaving the very comfortable job that you're in.
Eli Cahan:
The very comfortable job that you raised millions of dollars from strangers to do and then had to tell them that you were leaving. That one, that job? Yeah. Okay. All right. Episode four, we'll talk about that.
On a serious note, I think probably a lot of people listening may be interested in how you thought about making some of those very difficult choices, right? I mean, these were difficult choices that you made. Certainly one to give up not only a great investing job, but an investing job with certainty where you'd done a lot of hard work to earn people's trust to raise a fund, to now make a pivot to pursue something that felt like it was more aligned with what you wanted to do. How did you manage the challenges of that decision? How did you manage the conversations with your colleagues around that decision? And what gave you the conviction that despite all of that discomfort, it was the thing you needed to do?
Ileana Pirozzi:
I still have some lingering discomfort. I like to think that I'm a dependable person, somebody that does what they say they're going to do, and that was a big commitment that I had made. I'm not a mother, but I think about motherhood in that way. It's not something that you can do on a whim and then regret a couple of years later. So, I definitely had a lot of turmoil and I felt like it put my identity in question, but at the end of the day, I had to be true to myself and to the people that trusted me to do a good job, and I was not going to do a good job from the moment that this virus came inside my head, and it was most honest to acknowledge that. And I, perhaps because I had built very good relationships with the people that I worked with, I was able to be really honest with them, to show them what I was thinking.
And I was very, very lucky to find support. And actually, I asked them what they would do if they were me. Bringing them into that decision, my former partners was probably one of the better decisions that I made in that process. I think people ultimately understand people and I just tried to be a person in the process.
Eli Cahan:
Yeah. And they probably came to understand that the same person who they trusted to have sort of relentless and boundless curiosity in the investing world was the same person who might fall down a particular rabbit hole and need to solve it.
Ileana Pirozzi:
I also didn't feel particularly irreplaceable as an investor, if that makes sense.
Eli Cahan:
We'll have to talk to them about whether or not that's true, but fits in the theme of imposter syndrome that I know a lot of us feel at various stages. How did Knight-Hennessy play a role in this journey from following your curiosity immediately after graduation to now doing what you're doing, working day in, day out, spilling pig blood all over the floor of your office?
Ileana Pirozzi:
I have literally never said that.
Eli Cahan:
Yeah. Okay. How did Knight-Hennessy shape your journey?
Ileana Pirozzi:
How did pig blood even get into my office?
Eli Cahan:
I don't know. These are the things that we should talk about off the record.
Ileana Pirozzi:
I think Knight-Hennessy actually gave me a lot of patience. I think something that was common to us pioneering 2018 cohort was the fact that we didn't really know what Knight-Hennessy was supposed to be. There was no model for it. There was no path to follow. And in fact, we were being told we were this group of 50 leaders, world leaders being put in a room, that we're supposed to figure something out. And many of us maybe started feeling a little impatient, like nothing is really happening. What are we supposed to do? And sitting in that discomfort is actually one of the most clarifying experiences you can have in life. And I certainly believe that now doing what I'm doing now, but yeah, it gave me the ability to sit with uncertainty, to develop patience, and invest more in what's there in the moment than what's in the future.
And what was there in the moment was people. We didn't really, like I said, have a very defined curriculum or program that was all being built, but we had these really awesome people that were all there for a reason, a different reason. And so I focused on that. I remember there was something John said, maybe picking up on this tension and restlessness that we were feeling. He said, "Actually, I expect that we will start to see your impact as the class of 2018 about five years after you graduate." That felt like a permission to feel better about the fact that we had no idea what we were doing or what-
Eli Cahan:
[inaudible 00:22:33].
Ileana Pirozzi:
... we wanted to do. Yes.
But the bad news is that that's 2026 for me, which is this year.
Eli Cahan:
Better get a move on.
Ileana Pirozzi:
Yeah.
Eli Cahan:
Chickens are coming home to roost. When you talk about moments in Knight-Hennessy that you invested deeply in, what are the moments you remember? Big or small.
Ileana Pirozzi:
I remember, well, Abuzar and I, we became really interested in the power of stories.
Eli Cahan:
Abuzar Royesh, who's one of the 2018 cohort scholars.
Ileana Pirozzi:
Yep, and still one of my closest friends and closest cohort mates from Knight-Hennessy. We became really interested in the power of stories, which was something that was actually emphasized at Knight-Hennessy from year zero. Outside of the cohort, Dan Klein was probably one of the most influential people that we met that year.
Eli Cahan:
Dan Klein, Stanford professor who teaches improv and storytelling skills-
Ileana Pirozzi:
Yes.
Eli Cahan:
... as part of the longitudinal Knight-Hennessy curriculum, your first year.
Ileana Pirozzi:
Yeah. I mean, you kind of just realize that life is improv and that telling stories is the most effective way to connect with people and understand people. And in many ways, persuade people, convince them of your ideas.
But at the time, again, all we had was each other. It's not some sad story, but we started investing in the idea of understanding each other more and each other's stories. So we sort of formalized that into tradition that we called Deep Dive in the KHnight. Now everything that starts with an N in Knight-Hennessy is actually KHN.
Eli Cahan:
Couldn't be anything else.
Ileana Pirozzi:
I think we started that.
Eli Cahan:
Yeah, you started going-
Ileana Pirozzi:
But it was going to happen.
Eli Cahan:
Yeah, you guys have best everything.
Ileana Pirozzi:
It was going to tackle it anyway, it was going to happen. But yeah, I think those nights were the moments that I would always hold closest to my heart, just sitting in that circle and going really deep in our backgrounds and our stories. I mean, maybe we all needed therapy. I don't know, but it was special.
Eli Cahan:
Yeah. Do you want to say a little bit more about what DeepDive entailed? Because it was something that my class, when we invaded your space, we inherited DeepDive as part of our experience. So can you say a little bit about what DeepDive was and still is, and how maybe for you it's emblematic of your Knight-Hennessy experience?
Ileana Pirozzi:
Yeah. DeepDive is a fireside format, which now is super popular, but at the time, I feel like it was special. Everything was special.
Eli Cahan:
Okay.
Ileana Pirozzi:
We were the pioneers. We minted everything.
Eli Cahan:
All right. That's the sixth-tiniest-
Ileana Pirozzi:
Okay. So we had this big screen and we put a YouTube video with a fireplace on it, which immediately turned the space into a different place. We turned it into a living room, someone's living room. And then we would all sit on the floor on pillows and get pretty close, like physically close. And I think that was emblematic of getting close to each other. We really started it because we felt like there wasn't enough depth going on. Like I said, you're putting this new fancy building that everyone at Stanford is sort of peeking into the windows of, and you're not really sure what you're supposed to do. It's like a leadership program. What does it mean? What am I leading? Who am I leading? Why me? Why me? And there was a lot of... I felt like there was a lot of posturing and of not wanting to be that honest because no one really knew, again, why we were there or what we were doing.
So we started DeepDive as an opportunity to sort of take oiur clothes off, be naked in front of each other. And yeah, I went to Brown.
Eli Cahan:
Rhetorically. Rhetorically naked, not in fact naked. Just clarifying for-
Ileana Pirozzi:
You weren't there, actually.
Eli Cahan:
That's true. That's true. Yeah. Wow. I really did miss out. You're right. No, now I have FOMO.
Ileana Pirozzi:
But we got really deep into each other's stories, where we came from, why we did what we did, what motivated us, what legacy we wanted to have in the world, and what our belief systems were, how they might change or be challenged. And yeah, it turned out that everyone had incredible stories and that was probably the most valuable thing we could gain from each other at that point, just the perspective and the ability to see a different person in front of you.
Eli Cahan:
A person who you may have chatted with in passing for months before then.
Ileana Pirozzi:
Yeah.
Eli Cahan:
Yeah. I remember after my first DeepDive, one of the things that I thought about that Knight-Hennessy had given lip service to in the recruitment process, but something that I kind of wondered how they were going to actualize this was they spoke a lot about listening as a skill, and in particular as a leadership skill. And I remember after the first DeepDive, classically, there were 45 minutes, one scholar interviews another, and then usually it changes, either the two flip or more commonly there would be two separate scholars who were being interviewed, two separate scholars who were doing the interviewing. And I remember being struck how much you can learn about somebody in 45 minutes if you just listen.
And so I know me personally in our class, we're enormously grateful to you and Abuzar for inaugurating this thing. I know it still remains a very strong tradition today.
I want to move into a separate segment of the conversation here. Obviously, we could talk about this all day, but what I want to do is move into the favorite section here on the podcast, which is the popcorn section, which are the questions I did not give you in advance. So you're just going to have to deal with it in your discomfort because you're so good at feeling discomfort. She's literally... Arms are crossed. She's trying to fall out of the window of my apartment because she's so uncomfortable.
Okay. So first question, what was your favorite Knight-Hennessy trip?
Ileana Pirozzi:
My favorite Knight-Hennessy trip was our first retreat in Asilomar, our first year. I actually didn't get to go on the long form Knight-Hennessy trip on the cultural trip because it was... COVID hit and then didn't work out for me. But the Asilomar trip, I mean, it's like the first time that you do an overnight with your best friends and was on the beach and it was a beautiful sunset.
It was one of those moments, a little bit like DeepDive where we got to be more unbuttoned and raw and creative and just there. We did a good job, I think, of not making it too structured. And I think that unstructured time ended up being the most valuable parts of the program to me.
Eli Cahan:
What was your favorite Denning House snack?
Ileana Pirozzi:
I think I ate probably about half the yogurts in the fridge every week. I didn't realize the role of probiotics in your diet until they were free and there, which the first time that that happened for me was at Denning House.
Eli Cahan:
You ate them for the probiotics?
Ileana Pirozzi:
Yeah. I actually think my my body craved yogurt and whatever was in it. And when I looked it up, it said it was probiotics.
Eli Cahan:
Interesting. What book did you leave in the Denning House Library? Do you remember? There used to be a tradition at least of every graduating scholar would leave a book in the library.
Ileana Pirozzi:
It's a book by Robert Green. I think it's called The Art of Seduction.
Eli Cahan:
And why did you leave that?
Ileana Pirozzi:
I knew that you were going to ask that! Yes, it's called The Art of Seduction.
Eli Cahan:
Because you realized all of your deeply brilliant scholars needed relationship advice. Is that why you left it?
Ileana Pirozzi:
It's actually not really about relationship advice, surprisingly. It's about human advice. It's about connecting with other humans and different strategies to do so under different constraints, let's say.
Eli Cahan:
That is the most Bay Area [inaudible 00:30:55] that I've ever heard, but we'll go with it. If you had to pick one scholar to be stranded on a desert island with, who would it be and why?
Ileana Pirozzi:
I might have to go with Bingyi because I think she would just be really annoying at first. She would be complaining about the fact that we're stuck on this desert island, and how the heck did this happen to us? It would be really entertaining to watch her freak out about it. But then she'd be so smart to save me from the many dangers of a desert island and help me figure out how to get out. So I would get entertainment, safety, and top-notch science and engineering.
Eli Cahan:
The whole package. Who can turn that down? I'm sure she's going to be very flattered by your description of what the first couple days on the island would be. What advice do you have for prospective scholars, people who are currently applying or thinking about applying in the future?
Ileana Pirozzi:
One word that I learned at Knight-Hennessy was a word serendipity, which actually doesn't have a translation in Italian. So that's fair that I didn't know what that word meant. But I would say sometimes allowing things to happen the way they should happen is not a sign of a lack of ambition, but it's a sign that you also can trust in the world and the universe and not just yourself. And so if Knight-Hennessy is the best way for you to do that, then so be it. And if it's not, then there's a whole world out there waiting to be discovered.
Eli Cahan:
You know what else doesn't have a translation in Italian?
Ileana Pirozzi:
What?
Eli Cahan:
San Pellegrino, because apparently you guys don't drink it. This is the things that I learned from Ileana Pirozzi. This is what I learned just before we came on air here. But what a wonderful conversation. Ileana, thank you for taking the time. I know I speak on behalf of everyone who might be listening that we look forward with much anticipation to the work you're doing now. I'm sure it will be a gift for all of us. And I can't wait to talk about it because you have been, as you must, very tight-lipped, but it sounds like deeply important and exciting work.
Ileana Pirozzi:
Important to me and hopefully to more people.
Eli Cahan:
Well, thank you for taking the time away from that work. That is the end of today's podcast. Thanks to everybody who tuned in, and we will see you next time.
Ileana Pirozzi:
Thank you, Eli. Thanks for having me.
Willie Thompson:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Imagine A World, the alumni version, where we hear from inspiring graduates of the Knight-Hennessy community who are making significant contributions in their respective fields, challenging the status quo, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible as they imagine a world they want to see.
This podcast is sponsored by Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University, a multidisciplinary, multicultural graduate fellowship program, providing scholars with financial support to pursue graduate studies at Stanford while helping equip them to be visionary, courageous, and collaborative leaders who address complex challenges facing the world. Please follow us on social media at Knight-Hennessy and visit our website at kh.stanford.edu to learn more about the program and our community.
