I am an entrepreneur and speaker - I am a dreamer, a believer, a darer and a doer.
My passion is innovation, personal development, changing paradigms, people and the adventures of life. This is closely linked to my childhood. Without sharing stories about how I learned to ride a bicycle and how I believed a “goal kick” in soccer actually meant kicking the goal frame, I will briefly address it:

There is no ordinary childhood; however mine was very close to an average lovely Danish childhood: I played sports, ate ice cream, I lived surrounded by playgrounds, green trees and friends. At the age 13 I was diagnosed with cancer for the first time and here my ordinary childhood stopped.

Fast-forward: 5 years, numerous treatments and surgeries later. I had beaten cancer twice and now consider the cancer being one of the best things that happened to me – besides surviving it. It gave me perspective, a positive approach and a love of life at a very young age.

This approach to life and skill set led me to be absorbed in the world of innovations and entrepreneurship where core skills like adaptability, positive thinking and creativity are very similar to the ‘lessons learned’ from surviving cancer.

Be My Eyes is a wonderful purpose driven organization that I am proud to lead towards a big positive impact in the world of micro volunteering.

Rupal Patel is CEO and Founder of VocaliD, a company that is bringing speaking machines to life through its personalized digital voices. Her training as a clinician and speech scientist led to her initial insight to (re)construct a voice by combining samples of speech from a surrogate talker and the recipient. VocaliD’s award winning technology leverages its large and growing voicebank of speakers from around the world and voice matching-blending algorithms to create unique vocal identities to enable every voice to be heard.

Rupal is a tenured professor at Northeastern University with joint appointments in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and the College of Computer and Information Science. She is currently on leave to launch VocaliD.