WIN Women’s Initiative Network – Meeting on Artificial Intelligence

Date: September 7, 2025

Organized by Shaku Nitturkar
Speakers:
Sonalee Tambat (Director at Alcon) – Digital Twins & AI in Healthcare
Neena Sathi (AI Educator & Consultant) – AI in Practice: From Search to Investment Analysis

The Women’s Initiative Network (WIN), founded to bring professional women together in support, learning, and growth, hosted an engaging session at in Irvine, featuring two expert-led talks on the impact of artificial intelligence across industries. Organized by Shaku Nitturkar, the meeting highlighted how AI is shaping healthcare, product development, education, and investment management.

Digital Twins & AI in Healthcare – Talk by 

Sonalee Tambat

Sonalee opened with a deep dive into digital twins—virtual replicas of physical systems that allow scientists and engineers to model, simulate, and optimize complex processes. Once used primarily in aerospace and space missions, digital twins now play a growing role in healthcare, automotive, and other industries.

She highlighted the promise and challenges of personalized medicine, where each patient’s treatment plan could be simulated and tested virtually before being applied in real life. Sonalee drew from personal experience, recounting her father’s corneal transplant and emphasizing the unmet medical needs that AI-driven technologies could help address. Ophthalmology in particular is benefiting from simulation models that replicate how drugs and therapies are delivered to the eye, opening the door to more precise, patient-specific treatments.

Sonalee also explored AI’s role in product development and validation. While AI can assist in design generation and model testing, she stressed that human oversight and rigorous data validation remain essential. She pointed to projects such as the “Living Heart,” a large-scale initiative combining industry and academia to simulate cardiac processes. The conversation also touched on important considerations like cybersecurity risks in healthcare data, rising costs, and improving patient access to clinical trials.

Her talk underscored both the potential and the limitations of AI in healthcare—powerful tools that can augment human expertise but cannot yet replace it.

AI Evolution & Practical Applications – Talk by 

Neena Sathi

The second session, led by AI educator Neena Sathi, shifted the discussion from theory to practical application. Neena began by tracing the evolution of AI: from early rule-based systems, to the rise of machine learning, and today’s large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. She explained how these models are trained on vast public datasets, requiring immense computational power, and how interacting effectively with them requires the new skill of prompt engineering.

Neena compared Microsoft Bing’s AI capabilities with ChatGPT, highlighting Bing’s retrieval-augmented generation, which allows real-time access to current information. Demonstrations showed how Bing could answer up-to-date queries (like the latest movie listings), whereas ChatGPT excels at deeper synthesis but is limited to the data it was trained on. Participants were encouraged to explore a sandbox environment for hands-on practice with prompts.

The discussion also focused on AI in investment analysis, education, and healthcare. Attendees saw how AI models can support portfolio construction, generate market insights, or assist with automating assignments in classrooms. Neena emphasized the importance of human knowledge and oversight in guiding these models, noting that while AI is powerful, its answers must be tested and validated.

The session explored both the opportunities and challenges of AI implementation—security vulnerabilities in AI-generated code, regulatory requirements in finance and healthcare, and the need for more adaptive teaching methods in education. Neena also shared her upcoming courses on prompt engineering, offering attendees resources to deepen their skills.

Community Takeaways

Both talks sparked lively discussion among participants, ranging from healthcare applications to AI’s role in everyday work. WIN continues to foster a collaborative environment where women professionals can learn from one another and gain insight into emerging fields. This meeting highlighted how AI is not just a technology trend, but a transformative force already reshaping industries we touch daily—from personalized medicine to financial decision-making.