Rachel Swaby,
Co-founder
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Rachel is a recovering print journalist-turned audio producer. When she wrote for magazines, her work appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others. Her feature for Runner's World on the journey of a man who ran around the world earned her a nomination for a National Magazine Award. In 2016, she launched Runner’s World magazine’s podcasting arm. She was the creator and host of Human Race, a longform narrative podcast by Runner's World, and she helped develop The Runner’s World Show. Rachel’s also an author: Her first book, Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science—and the World, was published by Broadway Books in 2015. Her second book (based on an episode of Human Race), is about a 13-year old girl who broke the women's marathon record in 1967. Mighty Moe: The True Story of a Thirteen-Year-Old Women's Running Revolutionary was published by FSG in October, 2019. Rachel registers a quiet volume, but she gives talks about women in science, appearing previously at the National Book Festival, MIT, Stanford, and on CBS’ Face the Nation.
Elise Hu,
Co-founder
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Elise is a voice you might know from public radio. She spent nearly a decade at NPR, as a regular voice on flagship shows All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Most recently Elise worked as a host and correspondent exploring the future out of NPR West in Culver City. A wanderlusty journalist with experience reporting from more than a dozen countries, she opened NPR’s first-ever Seoul bureau in 2015 and spent several years covering both Koreas and Japan. The job involved a lot of trying wild new experiences, so she created and hosted an eponymous video series about it, Elise Tries, which won a Gracie Award in 2018. Before NPR, Elise helped found the nonprofit digital startup, The Texas Tribune, in 2009. She led its multimedia team and launched its still-running tentpole podcast. She’s an alum of the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Journalism school, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and on the board of Grist. Her journalism work has won the national Edward R. Murrow and duPont Columbia awards, among others. Even though her company is called Reasonable Volume, Elise’s volume usually falls in the “loud” category.
Meghan Phillips,
COO
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Meghan is the only partner on our team who reads every word of terms and conditions documents, and someone’s gotta do it, right? Before joining Reasonable Volume, Meghan was a corporate litigator for a decade, advising clients on a wide array of business and legal issues and successfully representing asylum seekers pro bono. She’s originally from Northern California but has called Los Angeles home since graduating from Cornell Law School in 2010. She holds a JD and LLM in International Law. Before crushing it in court, Meghan crushed opponents on the soccer field, playing midfielder for the University of California, Davis, where she also earned her bachelor’s.
True story: She got roped into this venture while gabbing with Elise on a school playground, while only half paying attention to their respective daughters.
Percia Verlin, Production Coordinator
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Percia was most recently the production manager Prologue Projects, which is based in Brooklyn and has worked in audio production since her post-college internship at Radiolab. She has produced podcasts for Kerning Cultures, a show that tells stories from the Middle East and North Africa, and Marvel Entertainment.
