Carrie Yoder

Founder, Community & Research Development

I am a biomedical research assistant with a focus on women’s health, shaped by experiences in rural Indiana, global health settings, and academic research. I currently work on endometriosis, lupus, and prostate cancer projects as a research assistant at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard teaching hospital. Previously, I served as Head Caretaker of the vulnerable women’s section at Camp Moria in Lesbos, Greece, where I supported access to medical care for displaced women. I’m passionate about advancing equitable care and research for all women.

Katerina Pashiardis

Founder

Katerina, originally from Northern Virginia, works at the National Cancer Institute (NIH), where she leads a project in Dr. Matthew Wolf’s lab investigating an immunomodulatory biomaterial for post-resection melanoma treatment to improve biomaterial immune response and attenuate cancer recurrence. She graduated from Northeastern University (B.S. Bioengineering, Dec 2025), where she developed a novel probiotic therapy for hepatic encephalopathy in Dr. Neel Joshi’s lab and completed co-ops at Tessera Therapeutics and Tango Therapeutics, working on scaling a LNP-mediated CAR-T mRNA delivery platform for B-cell malignancies and CRISPR screens to identify novel synthetic lethal pairs in solid tumors.

Raised by a mother who modeled service, from volunteering at veterans’ shelters to organizing COVID-era food delivery for underresourced communities and serving as a volunteer EMT, Katerina carried that ethic into mentoring with Roxbury Robotics, a club that brings robotics and STEM education to elementary and middle schoolers in underprivileged Boston neighborhoods who might otherwise never have access to it. There, she guided students through semester-long LEGO robotics projects. That same drive shaped her senior capstone group’s project: a wound-healing biomaterial for rural populations facing hospital and ambulance deserts, where every 10 minutes of delay raises the risk of adverse outcomes by 6%.

Her passion for women’s health stems from her own unexplained, debilitating periods and from hearing countless women, friends, family, and strangers, go undiagnosed and undertreated for various conditions that have not been studied extensively or at all within women, especially abroad and for her family in Cyprus, where care is less accessible and advanced.

Katerina believes the immune system is the most imperative system of the body, as it protects all other bodily systems from failure, and that when it becomes dysfunctional, it allows for and perpetuates disease. Looking ahead, she hopes to pursue a PhD developing safer, more precise immunotherapies, and become a leader within science to improve science communication, trust, and mentorship.