Host Monique T. Marshall speaks with Sanjana Gurram and Pooja Patel, co-founders of EquiPad, about their effort to make safer, more sustainable menstrual products widely available in schools, workplaces, and other institutional spaces. Their work combines materials innovation with a systems-level approach to access: developing bio-based pads and tampons from agricultural waste fibers while designing dispensers and distribution models around the realities of facilities, budgets, and public policy. What would it mean to treat menstrual care as essential public infrastructure rather than a private inconvenience? The conversation explores period poverty, chemical exposure, supply-chain transparency, FDA approval, and the challenges of bringing a new biomaterial to market. Sanjana and Pooja also reflect on the role of customer discovery in shaping EquiPad’s evolution—and why building better products begins with understanding the full ecosystem in which they will be used.

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Sanjana Gurram

I’m Sanjana Gurram, co-founder and CTO of EquiPad. I’m a materials engineer and researcher currently getting my Masters in Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University, where I’m exploring opportunities to advance our materials R&D through Gotham Foundry.

I’ve always been driven by the convergence of human and environmental health. Studying environmental science and human biology at the same time in high school made it clear to me that the health of our bodies is deeply contingent on the health of the planet, and that medical practice carries a significant environmental footprint. That realization has shaped everything I’ve pursued since. At UC Berkeley, I worked in the Xu Group on embedding enzymes into soft plastics to yield recyclable oligomers, using biology and protein modeling to optimize degradation. I love working with sustainable materials to solve problems at the intersection of human and environmental health.

While at Berkeley, I enrolled in Deplastify the Planet, where I met my co-founder Pooja Patel. We worked with a bandage company to prototype a 100% biobased bandage, and that work turned our attention to menstrual care. When I dug into what’s actually in pads and tampons, I found that the products I grew up using were by mass about 90% plastic. The lack of transparency around products that stay on or in your body for a week out of every month is by design, and it disproportionately affects people who don’t have the luxury to question it.

That’s what led Pooja and me to build EquiPad. As CTO, I lead our materials R&D, developing a low-resource, adaptable process to convert agricultural waste fibers into pad and tampon components, and a cellulose-based superabsorbent polymer as a safer alternative to the polyacrylamide-based SAPs currently used in menstrual products.

Pooja Patel

Pooja Patel is the co-founder and CEO of EquiPad. She is a sustainable product developer who holds a Masters in Development Practice at UC Berkeley, where she met Sanjana. She leads product development of dispensers for EquiPad, working at the intersection of sustainability, public health, and human-centered design. Together with Sanjana, they are working towards building solutions that make menstrual care more accessible, equitable, and environmentally responsible in public spaces. With a background in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering with a focus on human factors and over 15 years of community service project experience, Pooja brings a systems and community-driven approach to solving complex challenges. Her experience spans climate tech, social impact, sustainable product development (from prototyping to production), equitable design, and designing for user adoption and scaling in low-resource settings, fueling her mission to create products and infrastructure that improve everyday health outcomes while advancing environmental sustainability.