Debra Meyerson
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Debra Meyerson

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Debra Meyerson was a tenured professor at Stanford University when she suffered a severe stroke in 2010. The stroke left her without the ability to move her right arm and leg, and, more profoundly, without the ability to speak. While she ultimately survived and regained independence through years of intensive therapy and hard work, she continues to live with physical limitations and speech challenges—and the loss of many aspects of her former identity as a professor, speaker, writer, athlete, mother, and wife. Debra found that, while there were resources to support physical recovery, there was a deep lack of support for the emotional journey and identity challenges so many survivors face. That realization drove her to write the first edition of Identity Theft: Rediscovering Ourselves After Stroke, published in 2019. Through that process, she and her husband, Steve Zuckerman, recognized a significant gap in stroke care—and co-founded Stroke Onward, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting survivors and families as they rebuild their identities and emotional well-being. Five years later, they co-authored the second edition of Identity Theft, incorporating new insights and resources developed 15 years after Debra’s stroke. Before her stroke, as a professor at Stanford and other universities before that, Debra’s work focused on how individuals create change from within institutions. She studied and taught about how small, everyday actions can disrupt what’s normal, chip away at the status quo, and create positive change. That work formed the basis of her acclaimed book Tempered Radicals (2001), and her work on feminism, identity, and change has been widely published in Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Research in Organizational Behavior, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, and other leading journals. Debra holds a BS and MS in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a PhD in organizational behavior from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She loves spending all the time she can with her three grown kids – Danny, Adam and Sarah; their wonderful partners – Dhivya, Mia and Parker; and Nilan – the first of what she hopes will be many grandkids.
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