Author Archives: Alicia Cormie

Take a bite out of these scrappy recipes from Google chefs

There’s been an uptick in home-cooked meals in my life over the past couple of years. (Quarantine cooking, anyone?) As my cooking increased, so did the food scraps. And while using my trusty compost bin has kept most of my unused food from heading to the landfill, I’ve made it a goal to get more scrappy with my cooking to cut back on food waste.

Finding creative ways to reduce food waste is something that teams at Google have been thinking about for years — especially with its recent pledges to cut food waste in half for each Googler and send zero food waste to the landfill by 2025. If they can figure out how to work with suppliers, chefs and Googlers to reduce food waste across offices in 170 cities — surely they could help me do the same in my kitchen. So for Stop Food Waste Day, I chatted with the chef behind Google’s food program, Michael Kann, to hear what Google is doing to cut back on food waste and learn tricks the rest of us can adopt at home — including scrappy recipes straight from Google’s kitchens!

Before you joined Google as the Global Culinary Strategy & Development Lead, your career spanned everything from working as a chef and training chefs to feeding entire student bodies at universities and airline passengers at cruising altitude. How have you thought about food waste in all these roles?

Food waste is a top focus for chefs — whether it’s because of the cost of goods or the environmental impact — and it’s something we take personally. There are techniques that culinary professionals use to reduce food waste no matter how many people they’re cooking for — everything from using as much of the product as possible during prep to coming up with inventive recipes that make the most of ingredients.

At Google, my focus is on infusing these strategies across our cafes and suppliers. My team and I also look at how technology — like Leanpath which helps chefs track what food is going to waste — can help our cafes reduce food waste.

For the home chefs, what tricks and tips can minimize our personal food waste?

Careful planning, prep and organization are the most important steps in reducing waste at home.

Plan out what you are making for the week so you buy only the ingredients you need, and leave days open for leftovers. When it comes to prepping the food, consider how you can do so in a way that maximizes how much of the piece of produce you use. For example, people often cut the entire top off a tomato instead of coring it. If you core it first, you can use the slices for dishes like sandwiches, and the rounded ends can be diced and made into something like salsa.

Get organized with how you store leftovers and new groceries. The first-in, first-out (FIFO) organization system used in most professional kitchens works great at home. First, label or mentally keep track of leftovers and find the expiration date on groceries. Then keep the items that expire first in front, so you’re more likely to grab them and use them.

Now for the tasty part, what are your favorite recipes that feature commonly scrapped foods as ingredients?

Stocks, stocks, and more stocks. Making vegetable stock is a great use of what might otherwise be wasted — like carrots nubs or celery ends. But never use the skins of carrots or onions — it will make your stock bitter.

Broccoli florets are a highly desired vegetable — when I worked at a university it was the most eaten vegetable. But it’s important to plan the menu for the rest of the plant that’s often forgotten: the broccoli stalk. A broccoli soup is a go-to standard, but I also enjoy a great broccoli slaw. This Broccoli Stalk Salad recipe — from Dana Gunders, a national expert and strategic advisor for food waste reduction and author of Waste Free Kitchen Handbook — makes a tasty slaw simply from shredding broccoli stems and carrots. You can also check out her Talks@Google for a kitchen demo and more tips.

On the more creative side, you can pickle things you'd typically toss — like cantaloupe rinds. Just cut them into strips, pickle them, and add them as a fun accouterment to any meal.

Vegetable Stock

Makes 1 gallon

Uses up: Leek tops, celery ends, herb stems, onion bits, ends of zucchini or summer squash

Using vegetable trims in stock is a great way to capture every last bit of goodness from the food you’ve brought into your home. With that said, some things make a stock bitter, sulfuric or just down right bad. So while I recommend using the trim of vegetables, it’s not the same as just throwing everything in the pot.

Key things to think about

  • You can freeze your trimmings to build up enough for a batch of stock. Freezing makes the texture mushy, but traps the nutrients which is what you really want.
  • Avoid peels, especially onions and carrots. The peel is a protective barrier for the plant and is often bitter. Adding these to your stock will intensify the bitterness.
  • Be careful with cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbages, etc.). Adding some may give a flavor you desire, but too many can be overwhelming. Note that the longer these items cook, the more sulfur taste and smell. This is why boiled cabbage smells so bad the longer you cook it, so brief is key here.
  • If an item is not viable to be eaten, don’t add it to your stock. For example, if an onion has a rotten side, cut out the rot and use the good parts. Watch your refrigerator and use the items before they turn.
  • Wash the dirt off of everything before adding to the pot. We want flavor, not grit.
  • The broth will last 5-7 days refrigerated or can be frozen.

Ingredients

3-4 pounds of mixed vegetables using the guidelines above

1 medium onion

2 carrots (peeled)

2 ribs of celery

3 bay leaves

5 peppercorn (more or less depending on your preference)

Herb stems

1 gallon cold water

Preparation

  • Put everything in a pot
  • Start from cold, then bring to a simmer (to remain at or just below the boiling point, usually forming tiny bubbles with a low, murmuring sound)
  • Simmer for 45 minutes
  • Strain through a sieve
  • Chill strained broth

Broccoli Stalk Salad

Makes 5 servings

Uses up: Broccoli stalks, avocados, carrots

For many of us, the stalks are the evil half of broccoli. We toss them away in favor of their soft-headed florets. But this salad depends on the stalks for extra crunch, so save them! Adding in creamy avocados and carrots makes the dish creamy and sweet. Make a chopped salad or grate all but the avocado for more of a slaw effect.

Ingredients

For the dressing

4 tablespoons olive oil

3 tablespoons red wine vinegar

2 teaspoons honey

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

Pepper to taste

For the salad

3 or 4 large broccoli stalks (not the florets!), peeled and cut into thin medallions

½ to 1 avocado, cut into 1/8-inch slices

1 carrot, peeled into long, thin strips

1/4 cup red onion, thinly sliced 

1 tablespoon fresh basil or cilantro as garnish (optional)

Preparation

  • In a small bowl, combine the olive oil, vinegar, honey, salt and pepper
  • In a medium bowl, combine salad ingredients
  • Pour the dressing over the vegetables
  • Let sit for 30 minutes before eating, allowing the broccoli to soften
  • Serve at room temperature with a few extra leaves of basil or cilantro scattered on top

Quick Pickled Cantaloupe Rinds

Makes 3 quarts

Uses up: Cantaloupe rinds

Pickling is an age-old process that helps make harder to eat items more consumable. Melon rinds offer a terrific texture when pickled and help make something alluring out of what would otherwise be tossed into the compost.

Key things to think about

  • Wash the melon before trimming.
  • Do not use any part of the rind that has soft spots.
  • Add dried peppers to spice it up, and play with the spices to find the balance you prefer.
  • Use quart mason jars, while this will not be truly “canned” there will be temperature states that need robust strength.
  • Use the wide mouth jars for ease of filling and emptying.
  • The rinds will last for 2-3 weeks.

Ingredients

The rind from 1 small cantaloupe, thinly sliced into 1-inch strips that fit vertically into a mason jar

For the pickling liquid

2 cups white vinegar (or apple cider vinegar)

2 cups water

2 cups sugar

1 thumb ginger, sliced thin

5 each black peppercorns

1 pinch red pepper flakes (more or less based on preference)

5-6 each allspice (whole)

Preparation

  • Tightly pack cantaloupe strips into mason jars
  • Bring pickling liquid to a boil, reduce to a simmer until sugar has dissolved
  • Pour directly into jars with cantaloupe rinds, be sure that the mason jars are at room temperature or even slightly warm (if they are cold they may crack)
  • Tightly cover with lids and allow to cool on the counter for 1 hour
  • Place in refrigerator

Let’s get personal: Adaptive learning tech and education

Twelve years ago, Shantanu Sinha left his job to join his long-time friend Sal Khan’s new venture. At the time, Sal was spending his days making educational YouTube videos. It was an unusual career choice for both of them. But they saw what was possible when students had more agency over their learning and how technology could play a role. Together they started the online education platform Khan Academy, and Shantanu worked there for five years.

Today, Shantanu is the head of Google for Education. His team works to improve teaching and learning with technology, and one promising area is their work with adaptive learning technology. This emerging, AI-driven technology supports tailored learning experiences for students and helps amplify teacher instruction.

To get a crash course on adaptive learning technology and what it means for students and teachers, we talked to Shantanu.

What exactly is adaptive learning technology?

The concept of adaptive learning has been around for decades. It refers to a type of learning where students are given customized resources and activities to address their unique learning needs. For example, if a student struggles with adding fractions, a teacher might offer 1:1 tutoring or additional practice problems. You can see the concept of adaptive learning play out in gaming. When I was a kid I remember playing Carmen Sandiego and noticing how the system was tailored to me and changed whenever I got something wrong.

What’s new is applying recent AI advances to this concept, which opens up a whole new set of possibilities to transform the future of school into a personal learning experience.

Can you share an example of what this might look like?

Imagine you’re a student stuck on a math problem. With 25 other students in your class, you can't always get immediate help, leaving you frustrated and diminishing your confidence to complete future problems. Now imagine a different scenario. You’re stuck on a problem, but instead of growing frustrated, you receive a helpful hint or video that gives you exactly what you need to unblock you. You realize what you need to do differently, complete the math problem correctly and feel more confident in your ability to learn.

Early attempts at adaptive learning worked only for very specific content and curricula. With recent AI advances in language models and video understanding, we can now apply adaptive learning technology to almost any type of class assignment or lesson at an unprecedented scale. When students receive individualized, in-the-moment support, the results can be magical.

Algebra video tutorial helps students stuck on a homework problem

Tell us about the magic.

We recently talked to an educator who is testing out a new adaptive learning feature that we’re developing called practice sets in Google Classroom. The feature allows teachers to create interactive assignments and provides students with real-time feedback. He said the instant feedback that kids received was like having a teaching assistant in the classroom at all times. The technology helped give students 1:1 attention and validation — so they knew right away whether they got a problem correct or incorrect — and drove students’ intrinsic motivation and engagement through the roof.

I saw a similar phenomenon back when I was part of Khan Academy. Over time, students not only became more proficient with subject matter content, but also in their ability to learn new material. They learned how to learn.

Read Article

Practice sets: a more personal path to learning

We’re announcing practice sets, an upcoming adaptive learning feature in Google Classroom to help teachers better support their students.

Read Article

How does adaptive learning technology help teachers?

Adaptive learning technology saves teachers time and provides data to help them understand students’ learning processes and patterns. For example, with practice sets, teachers can quickly see a student’s attempts at a given problem, so they know where a student got stuck and can identify areas for improvement. Since assignments are auto-graded, teachers can devote more time to making sure that each student gets the instruction and practice they need to succeed.

So is the future of education more personal?

Learning is inherently personal. Education should feel personal too, but there are time and resource constraints. As we build toward a more personal future for education, adaptive learning technology can help us get there faster. Our goal is to power the pursuit of personal potential — for both teachers and students — in and out of the classroom.

Over these past two years, technology has influenced where people can learn, but has it changed the way people learn?

When I look back to the start of my career and where the world is now, it’s clear that having immediate access to information has fundamentally transformed how, when and where we learn. Today, learning is a muscle we flex easily and often. At Google, we see this play out each day: 85% of U.S. YouTube viewers surveyed say they learn or improve their skills on the platform1 and more than a billion people turn to Search each day to discover something new.

As we think about the evolution of learning, what role can Google play?

We aim to be a learning company — for school, for work and for life. Last year, we launched a site all about our ongoing commitment to help everyone in the world learn anything in the world. Learning is personal. I’m excited to continue working with our partners to build toward a more personal future of education. When we apply the right technology to the process of teaching and learning, exciting things start to happen.

Give it up for the woman who helps Googlers give back

Over the past month, Googlers around the world have virtually volunteered in their communities — from mentoring students to reviewing resumes for job seekers. It’s all a part of GoogleServe, our month-long campaign that encourages Googlers to lend their time and expertise to others. GoogleServe is just one of many opportunities employees have to give back, and one of the projects that Megan Colla Wheeler is responsible for running. 

As the lead for Google.org’s global employee giving and volunteering campaigns, Megan’s role is to create and run programs like GoogleServe and connect the nearly 150,000 Googlers around the world to them. Ultimately, her job is to help Googlers dedicate their time, money or expertise to their communities. How’s that for paying it forward?

With more than ten years of experience at Google, we wanted to hear more about how she ended up in this job, her advice to others and all the ways volunteering at Google has changed — particularly this past year. 


How do you explain your job to friends?

My goal is to create meaningful ways for Googlers to contribute to their communities — by offering their time, expertise or money — and help connect them to those opportunities. 


When did you realize you were interested in philanthropy and volunteering?

I was a Kinesiology major in college. Toward the end of my sophomore year, I took a course on social justice and it struck a chord in me. Though I loved sports, I realized I wanted my career to be about something bigger, something meaningful. I wanted to lend my skills for good. So even though I graduated with a kinesiology major, I focused my job search on the nonprofit sector and got a job working for a nonprofit legal organization.


How did you go from there to leading volunteer programs for Google.org?

I never knew that the job I have now was even possible. I left my nonprofit job to become a recruiting coordinator at Google. My plan was to do it for a year, diversify my skills, then go back to the nonprofit world. 

I remember going to my first GoogleServe event. We helped paint and organize a senior citizen community center — all during the workday! It blew me away that Google placed such an importance on volunteering. Coming from the nonprofit world, it felt meaningful seeing a company that cares deeply about these things and encourages employees to get involved. So I stayed at Google and kept finding ways to work on these programs. 


Fast forward 10 years and you’re one of the masterminds behind these events. How has employee volunteering and giving at Google changed over the years?

So many of the things that Google has created, like Gmail, came out of grassroots ideas that then grew as the company did. The same is true of our work to help Googlers get involved in their communities. 


Take GoogleServe for example. In 2008, a Googler came up with the idea to create a company day of service. Over a decade later that campaign has gone from a day-long event to a month of service that encourages over 25,000 employees to volunteer in over 90 offices around the world. And it all started with one Googler saying, "This would be a cool idea." Along the way, more Googlers have come up with ideas to get involved in the communities where we live and work through giving and volunteering. Although the programs have grown and evolved over the years, we’ve maintained the sentiment that inspired those campaigns in the first place.


We’ve also been focused on connecting Googlers to opportunities that use their distinct skills, like coding or data analysis. For example, a team of Googlers - including software engineers, program managers, and UX designers - are currently working with the City of Detroit to help build a mobile-friendly search tool to help people find affordable housing. 


How has it changed in the past year?

At the core, these programs are about giving back, but they’re also culturally iconic moments at Google. They’re a chance for teams to connect and do something together that’s more than just your average team-building activity. You’re building a shared experience and meeting people from completely different roles and departments. They’re also a chance for teams to learn and grow from people outside of Google and to bring that perspective back to their job. 


Over the past year, people have felt generally disconnected. So even though our volunteering has become virtual, it’s still a chance to interact and contribute. Virtual or not, it really does create a positive work culture. 


What advice would you give to people who have a day job in one area and a passion in another?

Be willing to work hard and get your core job done and carve out time to keep doing what you’re passionate about. When you are working on projects that you love, it keeps you engaged in a really special way. And you never know when those passion projects will intersect with your core work, or when they’ll turn into something bigger. 


A marine biologist uses Maps to explore under the sea

Just under the water lies one of the biggest mysteries of the Great Barrier Reef: blue holes. These underwater sinkholes give researchers a rare look at ocean life and how we can protect it. Until a few years ago, only two blue holes were documented in the entirety of the Great Barrier Reef — they are hard to find and even harder to get to. 

With the help of Google Maps, marine biologist Johnny Gaskell and a team of researchers are finding previously unknown blue holes. In 2017, after witnessing Cyclone Debbie destroy many of the reefs in its path, he set out to find more blue holes. Home to hundreds of species of coral and serving as a protective waters for larger marine life, these formations give scientists a view of history buried in undisturbed sediment layers and clues about  how to better protect coral reefs. 

Using Google Maps’ satellite view, Johnny followed the cyclone’s path to pinpoint areas along the reef that might have been spared from damage. That’s when he spotted perfect circles along the reef, indicating a potential blue hole. The formation he identified was south of the Whitsundays in the Hard Line Reefs, a difficult-to-reach area of the Great Barrier Reef that’s dangerous to navigate. Despite this, Johnny and a team of divers headed out into the unknown, unsure of what — if anything — awaited them.

There’s still so many spots out in the Great Barrier Reef that are unexplored. Johnny Gaskell
Marine Biologist

With the satellite view of Google Maps on their phones, they navigated their boats through narrow channels in unsurveyed waters until the blue dot on their map was directly over the blue hole. Johnny dove in and found healthy coral formations that have sat undisturbed, possibly for centuries. Along the edges were delicate birdsnest corals, vibrant giant clams and huge branching staghorn corals. In the stillness of the blue hole’s center, there were green sea turtles, giant trevally and sharks that all called the dark, cool water home. 

  • An aerial image of a dark blue hole surrounded by lighter water.

    Using Google Maps’ satellite view, Johnny spotted perfect circles along the reef, indicating a potential blue hole. These rare underwater sinkholes offer vital information about life in the ocean. 

  • Johnny stands on the edge of the boat in a wetsuit, snorkeling gear and flippers.

    Once they navigated to where they thought the blue hole was, Johnny dove in.  

  • Johnny swimming over a coral formation surrounded by fish.

    Underwater were healthy coral formations.

  • Image of pink coral surrounded by a couple of brightly colored fish.

    Home to over 400 species of hard coral, like these, the Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on earth.

  • Johnny swims above the coral capturing images on an underwater camera.

    Scientists use the layers of sediment that collect at the bottom of blue holes to learn information about conditions in the past.

  • Bright blue fish swim around the yellow coral.

     Blue holes are biodiversity hotspots. Here, fish swim around the bright yellow coral. 

  • Johnny in his wetsuit holds up the camera showing a picture he took of the underwater coral.

    Johnny captured images of the blue hole to help create a snapshot of reef conditions. 

With the help of Google Maps, a discovery that would have taken years of underwater exploration on the seafloor is now allowing researchers to expand our understanding of the world’s largest ecosystem. Today, Johnny is still working to build a snapshot of coral reef conditions. Working with Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef and the Great Reef Census project, they are using geotagged images to give everyone — from scientists to students — a better idea of what’s going in depths of the water whether they dive in or not. 

In 2021 the Great Reef Census is expanding to reach more reefs, collect more data, and broaden its research goals. To join the efforts, sign up as a Citizen or contribute directly via the project’s fundraising page. 

When it comes to mental health, what are we searching for?

You know that exhaustion you’re feeling — the one that no amount of espresso shots or power naps can remedy? Well, it turns out you’re not alone. 

Last month in the U.S. we saw spikes in fatigue-related Google searches, and the question “why do I feel bad?” reached a record high. There’s a collective feeling of exhaustion, and we’re all looking for ways to cope with it. Over the past year, we’ve seen an increase in searches related to meditation, virtual therapy, walking and digital detoxes. 

Since this week marks the beginning of Mental Health Awareness Month in the U.S., we chatted with two of Google’s experts on the topic: Dr. David Feinberg, a psychiatrist by training and head of Google Health, and Dr. Jessica DiVento, a licensed clinical psychologist and the Chief Mental Health Advisor for YouTube. David and Jessica talk about why we’re feeling this way and what we can do about it. 


What’s going on with our collective wellbeing at this moment in time? 

Jessica: Our body’s threat detection system is working in overdrive. We’re constantly making sense of what’s happening so we know what’s causing us stress and can react to it. People don’t realize how much mental energy that takes. Even though you might not be doing much physically, it makes sense to feel fatigued. 

In the U.S., more people are getting vaccinated and guidelines are changing. Adjusting to this new routine takes a lot of cognitive processing. 

David:It's a hard transition. Our bodies are good at achieving homeostasis. I’ve become comfortable working from home, eating outside and socializing within my pod — these are abnormal things that I’ve incorporated as normal. In parts of the world, you’re telling me to go back to my old ways. Things that used to require minimal thinking — like meeting a friend for dinner — now require so much processing. 


How do you expect people’s emotions to change over the coming months? 

David:Fear is when you open the door and a bear is there. Anxiety is when there’s no bear and you don’t know why you’re feeling that way. We’ve been in a constant state of both with the pandemic. Already, I’ve felt a bit of these heavy feelings lift. When I got my first shot of the vaccine at CVS I felt some of the anxiety and fear I was carrying release — it was almost a spiritual experience. 

This is a dramatic life experience. It will be part of our narrative and change how we respond to things. When a vase falls and it breaks, you glue it back together. When it falls again it usually breaks in the same spot. When there are triggers — like seeing spikes in India — it brings back emotions from this collective trauma. 

Jessica:As a global society, there’s a long way to go. Some of us going through the reconstruction phase will ask, “Why am I not feeling better yet?” Transitioning out of this will take time. 


What have you both done to maintain your own mental health?

Jessica:We know all the things to do to minimize stress and anxiety: eat well, exercise, sleep and so on. We also know what doesn’t help. For me, that’s the overconsumption of technology. Digital wellbeing features, like Pixel’s Flip to Shhh and app timers, help me stop scrolling so I can be more present.

David:I’ve focused on my sleep. Dreams are a way to consolidate new information. I’ve measured my sleep with my Fitbit smartwatch and now with Sleep Sensing on my new Nest Hub, and have learned that eating or working out late at night negatively affects my sleep. So I’ve made adjustments.


As more people search for ways to cope, what are Google and YouTube doing to help?

David:Part of coping with anxiety is researching and taking action on the things you can control.  I love seeing Google connect people to actionable information through things like our mental health self-assessments, information on vaccination and testing locations, and authoritative data about things like symptoms and guidelines to stay safe.  

Jessica:The rise in searches for mental health content shows that it’s becoming okay to say that you’re not okay. The more conversations we spark and the more places we share content about mental health, the less stigma there will be. At YouTube, we work closely with experts in the mental health space to make sure there are credible and engaging videos out there. When someone searches specifically for anxiety or depression resources, we’ll show information about symptoms, treatment resources and self-assessments. And for searches that may indicate someone in crisis, we’re committed to connecting them with free 24/7 crisis support resources. Also, Fitbit recently teamed up with Deepak Chopra to create an exclusive wellness collection for its Premium members, making it easier for them to create a mindfulness practice. Things like that help make sure anyone can take care of their mental health and wellbeing. I hope that lives on past this moment. 


What questions do you hope the world is searching for in the next six months?  

Jessica: I think we’ll see people searching for ways they can help others — looking at careers in counseling and epidemiology — and how they can keep leaning into wellbeing. 

David:I hope people are searching “Am I in love?” and “Why do I feel great?”


Mountaineering to Maps: Rebecca Moore’s fight for the planet

Rebecca Moore lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a series of peaks in Northern California where the ocean and redwoods collide. Living there, amongst the trees, she turned to mapping as a way to protect the planet.

When a logging project was proposed in her community, she used Google Earth to show everyone how the plans would affect their daily lives and, more importantly, endanger the precious ecosystem surrounding them.  The logging plan was denied and that redwood forest is now being considered for permanent protection as public open space.

“In a way, technology and digital mapping can give nature a voice — it puts it on the map and helps it defend itself,” Rebecca says. “Seeing facts on a map quickly squashes debate and dispels misconceptions.”

For the past 15 years, Rebecca has led the Google Earth, Earth Engine and Outreach team. Their goal is to create a digital replica of the planet and put it into hands everywhere. They’ve mapped everything from endangered animal populations and fisheries to CO2 emissions and wildfires. We talked with Rebecca about why she thinks maps are so powerful and how she finds it in herself to tackle hard problems, like climate change. 


What does your team at Google do? 

Our goal is to organize all of the planet’s information and make it accessible, understandable and actionable. For example, Google Earth Engine helps us take the flood of environmental information from things like satellite imagery and weather data, and turn it into something that anyone can understand and take action on. And our Google Earth Outreach program helps nonprofits, communities and indigenous peoples around the world use our mapping tools to solve whatever problems they’re tackling. 


What makes maps so powerful when it comes to protecting the planet? 

The world is changing, but it’s hard to visualize it. If we can create a dynamic, digital replica of the real world and extract meaningful insights from it, then we can put it into the hands of people who can help protect and conserve the planet for generations to come. 

For example, we’ve seen how putting this information into the hands of indigenous communities can help protect land that’s under threat. We worked with the Suruí, a tribe in the Amazon, to use Google Earth‘s mapping tools to stop illegal logging in their region. 

Now, with Timelapse in Google Earth, anybody can fly over any region in the world and see decades of planetary change. When you see these changes with your own eyes, there’s what I call the digital overview effect — you become more emotional and more engaged. 


How do you identify areas where Google can have the biggest impact?

I look for the hard problems that Google can make a dent in. Climate change is at the top of that list. It’s an existential threat, and we’re all experiencing the effects of rising temperatures: from droughts to wildfires to islands disappearing. There’s a sense of urgency that we have to act now. 

Then I look for patterns. I've read voraciously over the past few years to understand what the world's best thinkers have identified as potential pathways to solving climate change. I look at how Google can uniquely contribute to those solutions. 


When taking on big challenges, how do you stay motivated? 

I was a rock climber and mountaineer for years — I even climbed in the Himalayas. When you climb a mountain, you don't actually see the summit from where you start. But you know if you head in a positive direction, eventually you’ll see it, and get there. And along the way, the little breakthroughs will motivate you. Same goes for making meaningful change to protect the planet. 

Sometimes the best thing is to make a choice, commit and go forward. Stay attentive and mindful to what's happening along the way, and be prepared to make mid-course corrections. And stay patient, taking on big challenges — whether it’s climbing or climate change — is hard work and it takes time. Even when the summit (or your goal) feels far away, don’t forget to turn around and look back to appreciate how far you have come. That can be super-motivating, and applies to my work today.

  • A woman rests on the edge of a cliff against a mountain landscape in the background.

    A rest break in The Bugaboos, a mountain range in the Purcell Mountains of eastern British Columbia, Canada.

  • A woman stands on the cliff of a mountain with climbing gear.

    Several hundred feet up Cathedral Peak in Yosemite National Park.

  • A landscape shot of the mountain peaks of the Bugaboos.

    Another scene from the Bugaboos, where Rebecca climbed three of the range’s classic granite spires.

You didn’t always work at the intersection of environment and technology. What put you on this path? 

I studied computer science, and after school I just wanted a job that was intellectually challenging. It didn’t matter so much what it was for and what I worked on. That changed after my father, who was an attorney and argued a landmark civil rights case, and my brother, who was an artist and an activist, died within five months of each other. It hit me that we don’t live forever. It seems cliche, but I didn’t want to look back and think I frittered away with stuff that didn’t matter.  

I needed that sense of urgency to stop what I was doing, leave my job and reinvent myself. I didn’t know what my next move was, and it took me three years to figure it out, but I was determined to find a way to bring my own talents to bear and work on things I cared about. I started small, helping protect the nature that surrounds my community in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and went from there.

A recipe for productivity

Dr. Kapil Parakh is a Medical Lead for Google Fit and a practicing cardiologist at the VA in Washington, D.C. During the week he splits his time between seeing patients, developing technology that improves wellbeing and staying active with his family. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s even picked up a new hobby to cope during quarantine: baking baguettes. 


Every day, Kapil draws on his unique background to help people live longer and healthier lives. Before coming to Google, he completed medical school in Zambia, trained at Johns Hopkins in cardiology, public health and epidemiology, and served as a White House Fellow.


His long list of roles and responsibilities makes me wonder how he finds time for it all — so I asked him. Kapil says it boils down to what he considers his ingredients for success: get the most out of everything you work on, use the rule of thirds and have a rock-solid support system. 

Maximize the output of your work. 

Kapil’s consistent advice to others is to find a way to take what you’re working on and expand it into something bigger — with minimal extra effort. A few years ago, Kapil helped develop Heart Points for Google Fit, an activity goal based on recommendations shown to impact health. He then used that body of work to help educate personal trainers, cardiologists and people working in general medicine. It was the same context, repurposed for different groups. 


Similarly, before joining the Fit team, Kapil worked on Google Search for three years. In his day-to-day work he thought a lot about how people searched for health-related content online and how Google could surface helpful information in return. As a result of his team's work, you can see health knowledge panels, information boxes on search results pages that help you quickly find medically accurate information about common symptoms and conditions.


That work could have ended when Kapil left the Search team. Instead, he took what he observed and turned it into something more: a book about how to find and use medical information online. That book, Searching for Health, was just published today. 


“We all have limited time,” Kapil says. “We need to try and maximize our output.” To do so, he suggests taking a single project that you’re working on, and consider how you can turn it into more formats for more people. 

Remember the rule of thirds.

Of course, this can’t apply to all of your work, all of the time. You aren’t going to be able to publish a book based on every work project. This is where Kapil’s rule of thirds comes into play. Roughly speaking, work can be broken down into three buckets: short-term work (like requests from others that pop up in your inbox or administrative tasks that require immediate action), mid-term projects (like creating a training or presenting your work at a conference) and long-term projects (like publishing a book). Those last two buckets are where maximizing your output comes into play.


“It’s a matter of being cognizant of all the things you’re working on and how they fit together toward your goals,” Kapil says. “It’s kind of like rock climbing, you have to be aware of the footholds. The way up isn’t straight up like a ladder, it’s more amorphous.”

Find support — whether it’s in relationships or a bag of flour. 

While Kapil’s advice is all about finding patterns and connecting dots, he doesn’t hesitate to take on completely new things — like baking bread. Last year Kapil was grieving the loss of his father in the midst of the pandemic. To help him cope, his wife handed him a recipe for baguettes. If nothing else, she thought it would be a good distraction. The result was both delicious and therapeutic — and Kapil is still churning out bread from his kitchen. Most importantly, it was a reminder to Kapil of how important his support system is. 

A loaf of bread shaped like a heart.

“It’s this type of support that allows me to balance so many hats,” he says. “As an immigrant and a person of color, I honestly wouldn’t be where I am today without the tremendous support of my family and mentors.”

More from this Series

Work Smarter

How Google tools can help you work smarter, and advice from Googlers on how they get it done.

View more from Work Smarter

A recipe for productivity

Dr. Kapil Parakh is a Medical Lead for Google Fit and a practicing cardiologist at the VA in Washington, D.C. During the week he splits his time between seeing patients, developing technology that improves wellbeing and staying active with his family. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s even picked up a new hobby to cope during quarantine: baking baguettes. 


Every day, Kapil draws on his unique background to help people live longer and healthier lives. Before coming to Google, he completed medical school in Zambia, trained at Johns Hopkins in cardiology, public health and epidemiology, and served as a White House Fellow.


His long list of roles and responsibilities makes me wonder how he finds time for it all — so I asked him. Kapil says it boils down to what he considers his ingredients for success: get the most out of everything you work on, use the rule of thirds and have a rock-solid support system. 

Maximize the output of your work. 

Kapil’s consistent advice to others is to find a way to take what you’re working on and expand it into something bigger — with minimal extra effort. A few years ago, Kapil helped develop Heart Points for Google Fit, an activity goal based on recommendations shown to impact health. He then used that body of work to help educate personal trainers, cardiologists and people working in general medicine. It was the same context, repurposed for different groups. 


Similarly, before joining the Fit team, Kapil worked on Google Search for three years. In his day-to-day work he thought a lot about how people searched for health-related content online and how Google could surface helpful information in return. As a result of his team's work, you can see health knowledge panels, information boxes on search results pages that help you quickly find medically accurate information about common symptoms and conditions.


That work could have ended when Kapil left the Search team. Instead, he took what he observed and turned it into something more: a book about how to find and use medical information online. That book, Searching for Health, was just published today. 


“We all have limited time,” Kapil says. “We need to try and maximize our output.” To do so, he suggests taking a single project that you’re working on, and consider how you can turn it into more formats for more people. 

Remember the rule of thirds.

Of course, this can’t apply to all of your work, all of the time. You aren’t going to be able to publish a book based on every work project. This is where Kapil’s rule of thirds comes into play. Roughly speaking, work can be broken down into three buckets: short-term work (like requests from others that pop up in your inbox or administrative tasks that require immediate action), mid-term projects (like creating a training or presenting your work at a conference) and long-term projects (like publishing a book). Those last two buckets are where maximizing your output comes into play.


“It’s a matter of being cognizant of all the things you’re working on and how they fit together toward your goals,” Kapil says. “It’s kind of like rock climbing, you have to be aware of the footholds. The way up isn’t straight up like a ladder, it’s more amorphous.”

Find support — whether it’s in relationships or a bag of flour. 

While Kapil’s advice is all about finding patterns and connecting dots, he doesn’t hesitate to take on completely new things — like baking bread. Last year Kapil was grieving the loss of his father in the midst of the pandemic. To help him cope, his wife handed him a recipe for baguettes. If nothing else, she thought it would be a good distraction. The result was both delicious and therapeutic — and Kapil is still churning out bread from his kitchen. Most importantly, it was a reminder to Kapil of how important his support system is. 

A loaf of bread shaped like a heart.

“It’s this type of support that allows me to balance so many hats,” he says. “As an immigrant and a person of color, I honestly wouldn’t be where I am today without the tremendous support of my family and mentors.”

More from this Series

Work Smarter

How Google tools can help you work smarter, and advice from Googlers on how they get it done.

View more from Work Smarter

Dr. Ivor Horn talks about technology and health equity

Dr. Ivor Horn’s career has spanned medicine, academia and technology. Along the way she’s been focused on one thing: making sure that people get what they need out of the healthcare system and attain their fullest health potential — no matter who they are. 

She recently joined Google as the Director of Health Equity & Product Inclusion. We sat down with her to learn more about what health equity looks like, how technology can help and what she’s working on at Google. 

Where did your passion for this work come from? 

Growing up, I spent a lot of time in hospitals. When I was in the fourth grade, my dad had a head injury and developed a seizure disorder. Being Black in Mississippi, where I grew up, my mom would make sure that we all dressed up when we went to the doctor so they would recognize that my dad was someone who was cared for and who was loved — all that with the hope that we’d get better care. Living through that made me want to go to medical school so I could change the healthcare system. I didn't want other people to go through what we did. 

Once I was a practicing pediatrician, I saw patients in communities that were underserved by health care. I noticed young parents bringing their child and their flip phones into the clinic. They’d pull out their phone to show me things like a photo of their child’s rash that faded overnight. This tool helped them communicate with me more effectively, and I became interested in figuring out how we could use technology like that to improve health care more broadly. 

Can you tell us more about health inequity and the pandemic?

It’s important to remember that health inequity is the product of systemic and structural racism, particularly in the U.S. We know that people’s experience with health can be impacted by where they live, how wealthy they are, and their ethnicity or skin color. Before the pandemic, studies showed that people of color had less access to primary care, received a lower quality of treatment in places like emergency departments, and were less likely to be given additional examinations like blood tests. 

When you have a broken foundation, those cracks eventually become tremendous fissures — and that's what we saw with COVID-19. Health inequities surfaced at every level — from the lack of available protective equipment in developing countries to the higher than average death rates and infection of people of color. Health inequity has been an endemic aspect of the pandemic.

How do you even begin to solve that?

We cannot continue to build on something that's broken. Mending the cracks starts with building technology that helps those who are experiencing what's most broken about the healthcare system. If you build for that community, it will work for others — then you can transform healthcare.

This week’s news about vaccines is a great example. We’ve created virtual agents so anyone — especially those without access to the internet or people with limited tech skills — can book appointments and get critical vaccine information in whatever way they’re most comfortable with. It's available in multiple languages and modes of communication — whether that’s over the phone, through text, or on the web. We’ve also made vaccination locations available on Google Maps in the U.S. and other countries. All of this is to help reduce inequities, both in the outcomes and in the distribution of vaccines. 

But, technology has its limits; it can facilitate this work, but it’s not the complete solution. That’s why it’s important to partner with community-based organizations to reach people who might not otherwise see mainstream public service announcements or have easy access to vaccinations.

What role does Google play?

When you look at Google through the lens of health equity, so much of what we do touches people along their health journey. Research shows that roughly 7 in 10 people turn to the internet first when they’re looking for health information. We have the chance to build products that guide them to the right resources and find the information they need. 

My job is to look across all of our products to make sure we embed health equity into the DNA of everything we do. 

When tackling big problems, like health equity, what keeps you motivated? 

This generation of young people is fighting for lasting change with an energy that’s contagious. Seeing the things that we’ve worked so hard for, for so long, become the passion of a new generation makes everything I’ve done and continue to do so worth it.  If I can help make the structural changes so that they can fly, I’ll count that as a win. 

3 ways Liza Goldberg uses Timelapse to explore the planet

Liza Goldberg has a big-picture view of climate change — and it all started with satellite imagery. In high school she started an internship at NASA, where she built a program that used satellite imagery and Google Earth Engine, a platform for geospatial analysis, to monitor the loss of mangrove forests. This gave her a whole new perspective of planetary changes. 

“I was seeing the world through a different lens,” Liza says. “Without images, it’s hard to visualize what things like urbanization, deforestation, wildfires and rise in temperatures mean to our planet — just using statistics and data doesn’t get the message across. I wanted to bring a new perspective to others.” Liza is now a freshman at Stanford University and runs Cloud to Classroom, a program that uses satellite imagery to help teach students around the world about climate change. 

Today, that birds-eye view of the planet is available to even more people with the launch of Timelapse in Google Earth. For the first time, 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years have been embedded directly into Google Earth, creating an explorable view of our planet over time. Now anyone can watch time across the globe. And that perspective can be enough to inspire anyone to take action — just like it inspired Liza. 

Related Article

Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

In the biggest update to Google Earth since 2017, you can now see our planet in an entirely new dimension — time.

Read Article

“If we want to solve climate challenges, the bottom line is we need to take this information out of scientific papers and put it into the hands of the public so they can make positive change in their local areas,” Liza adds. 

As someone who has spent a lot of time looking at satellite imagery of the Earth, Liza has a few pointers for how to explore the planet with Timelapse and put these changes into context. She shares some of her tips here: 

Zoom in on your community

If you're a teacher, reporter, student or just someone exploring Timelapse, start looking at the places you care about. Use the search bar function to zero in on a region you know really well — whether it’s the city you grew up in, the place your grandparents are from or where you spent your summers growing up. Seeing the changes at a more personal level contextualizes what global environmental change actually means right now and what it could mean in the future of your local community. 

An animated GIF of satellite imagery showing how Cape Code has changed over time.

Take a look at how Cape Cod, Massachusetts has changed from above. 

Look for the patterns

The patterns are everywhere. You can see how the same trends — like rapid changes from wildfires — are taking place on the West Coast of the U.S. and across the world in Australia. Start with the curated videos from Google that show the story of change related to forest change, urban growth, warming temperatures and more. Then start to look for other trends you see happening across the world. It can be an exercise in unity to see what communities are experiencing here and elsewhere, and see how these changes transcend communities and ecosystems.  

An animated image showing how satellite imagery of how urbanization changes the landscape.

See how urbanization changes the landscape. 

Soak up the fragile beauty of it all 

The Timelapse videos are like vignettes of art — enjoy them. Take a step back and remember that this is our planet and it's worth protecting. For me, videos like the meandering rivers are captivating. The ability to watch the planet change over time is now in the hands of everyone, and that makes me optimistic. 

A Google Earth Timelapse of a meandering river over time.

A Google Earth Timelapse of a meandering river over time.

From Liza’s perspective, technology like this can help affect change. In fact, she’s even started to focus more on studying computer science and plans to use those skills to tackle the big issues she cares most about, like climate change.