What does it take to lead a room, rebuild trust or rewrite a limiting belief? This month’s six Innovation Women Featured Speakers have answers, drawn from careers in medicine, finance, tech and mental health. Every month, we spotlight women and other underrepresented voices from our speaker database. Meet August’s featured speakers:
Dr. Jess Bunin | Co-Founder and Chief Architect, All Levels Leadership
COL (ret.) Jess Bunin, MD, MHPE, is a speaker, executive coach, physician leader and author who has spent her career running toward the moments most people avoid, whether in a combat zone, an ICU or a difficult conversation. She retired from the Army in 2023 after 23 years of service that took her to Iraq as a psychiatrist and Afghanistan as an intensivist, followed by roles as Assistant Dean for Faculty Development at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and Program Director for the Critical Care Medicine Fellowship at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Today she is co-founder and chief architect of All Levels Leadership, a professor of medicine and health professions education, and a certified executive coach.
Jess says the hardest part of medicine are the conversations no one wants to have, and she’s built her career on teaching leaders how to have them. She’s especially drawn to early-career healthcare leaders, the new chiefs, program directors and medical directors who were promoted for clinical excellence and then handed responsibilities no one trained them for, giving them frameworks they can actually use so courageous conversations become a skill they own rather than a personality trait they wish they had. Leadership, she says, is the disciplined practice of creating clarity, safety and shared understanding in moments when it would be easier to stay silent.
Linda Grizely, CFP® | Financial Wellness Speaker, Linda Grizely Ventures, LLC
Linda Grizely is a financial wellness speaker who partners with organizations to reduce the costly impact of employee financial stress on focus, engagement and retention. A Certified Financial Planner® professional, she created the MeMoney® Method, a personality-driven framework that moves people away from guilt-based budgeting and toward intentional, values-aligned decisions and The Human Variable™, her signature approach to financial wellness. She speaks to employees, ERGs, associations, HR leaders and leadership teams on topics ranging from workplace financial wellness and behavioral finance to retirement readiness and money mindset, and hosts the Real Money, Real Life® podcast. Her work has been featured in CNN, MarketWatch Picks, Yahoo Finance and WSJ Buy Side, and MeMoney® was named a 2026 finalist for a Money Awareness and Inclusion Award.
Linda’s passion is helping people and organizations rethink their relationship with money and with themselves. She believes money should feel human, accessible and judgment-free, noting that too many people carry financial stress in silence, believing they should already know more or be further ahead than they are. What drives her, she says, is helping people feel seen, heard and equipped to make clearer, more confident decisions around their money.
Shri Nandan | SVP Product and Customer Experience, DahliaCX
Shri Nandan has spent more than 20 years working at the intersection of customer experience, digital transformation, product strategy and enterprise technology, helping organizations modernize how they serve customers and prepare for AI-enabled engagement. Her career spans telecommunications, healthcare, financial services, insurance and technology-driven environments, often stepping into situations where mandates are unclear, legacy systems limit progress and teams need a stronger operating model to move from vision to measurable execution. She speaks on building customer-centric products as well as executive leadership, exploring what it means to reclaim and evolve leadership in the age of AI.
Shri started her career as a technologist before moving into product management and customer experience, and now builds AI-enabled products. She credits mentors and leaders who trained her in empathetic leadership for much of her growth, along with a willingness to stay open to opportunities that felt frightening in the moment but led to a better future. What has remained consistent throughout her career is a belief that transformation is ultimately about people: customers who need simpler experiences, teams that need clarity and organizations that need the courage to modernize with purpose.
Shelley L. Nadel | Wealth Advisor and Financial Literacy Innovator, Radian Partners, LL
Shelley Nadel is on a mission to put more women in top leadership seats across corporate America, government and beyond, and she believes financial confidence is the engine that gets them there. A Certified Financial Planner® professional, she leads the Houston office of Radian Partners, LLC and founded Financial Success Strategies LLC and Food and Finance with Shelley Nadel, her signature brand built around her book, “The Wealth Recipe: A Culinary Guide to Financial Power.” Since 2007, Shelley has delivered financial literacy education, laced with humor and personal stories, to corporate and community groups, including ongoing programs for Baker Hughes and Gensler. Her teaching style is warm and plainspoken, deliberately free of jargon, and rejects fear-based messaging in favor of empowerment.
Her passion is helping people, especially women, replace confusion and uncertainty with confidence by making complex financial topics relatable. Since people remember stories far better than charts or technical explanations, that led her to start connecting financial concepts to recipes and cooking. What inspires her most, she says, is watching people leave her talks feeling empowered and ready to take action.
View Shelley’s speaker profile.
Meridith Grundei | Public Speaking and Presentation Skills Expert
Meridith Grundei is a speaker, trainer and executive communication expert who helps technical leaders and visionary entrepreneurs turn complex information into unforgettable presentations. She’s delivered high-impact keynotes for Amazon AWS, Accenture and The Channel Company’s Women of the Channel, blending the precision of a communication strategist with the creative firepower of a former Second City improv instructor and professional theater director. Her training programs, including Own Your Voice and Present with Impact, have reached teams and leaders at companies like Mercer, VISA, Google and Merck, teaching people to ditch robotic delivery, tell human-centered stories and lead with their voice.
Grundei says the moment that fires her up most is watching someone go from barely speaking up in a meeting to commanding a room with clarity and conviction. Her work centers on helping people find their voice, especially leaders in tech and business who are building the future but still feel stuck presenting it. She believes exceptional communication is a leadership skill and, in the tech world, often the missing link between brilliant ideas and real-world impact.
View Meridith’s speaker profile.
Kristen Jacobsen, LCPC | Psychotherapist, Author, Speaker and Consultant, Cathartic Space Counseling and Kristen Jacobsen Coaching & Consulting
Kristen Jacobsen is a psychotherapist, author, speaker, coach and consultant who founded Cathartic Space Counseling and Kristen Jacobsen Coaching & Consulting, where she helps people identify the subconscious core beliefs driving their struggles and build healthier ones in their place. She has taken the TEDx stage and been featured in outlets including Verywell Mind, Chicago Tribune, Psych Central, Self Magazine and CBS News. Last year she published her first book, “Unpacked: How to Detach from the Subconscious Beliefs that are Sabotaging Your Life,” distilling years of clinical work into a practical guide for breaking free of self-sabotaging patterns.
In her work, she’s most passionate about core beliefs: where they come from, and how the very beliefs that once protected us can end up holding us back. She points to the deep, often unspoken rules people carry about who they are, such as “I have to be perfect to be loved” or “Needing help means I’m weak,” which typically form early as smart adaptations to real circumstances but outlive their usefulness, showing up later as self-criticism, anxiety or limiting beliefs. That’s the work she loves, she says: helping people trace a present struggle back to the belief underneath it, understand why it made sense at the time, and test whether it still holds true.
View Kristen’s speaker profile.
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