Debbie Lin Teodorescu MD, MEng, AM – President & Founder of SurgiBox, a startup born out of Harvard Innovation Labs and MIT D-Lab – will join us to discuss her journey as a physician-innovator. Debbie will share frank insights on how her clinical perspective helped to identify an unmet need, co-develop a solution with diverse stakeholders, and build the project into a sustainable startup. Topics will cater to audience interests, but potentially range from medtech to COVID-19 innovation response, student entrepreneurship, diversifying funding streams, innovation in medical careers, startup pitfalls, resources, and beyond.

About the Speaker:

Debbie Lin Teodorescu is an attending physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. While still in medical school, she built a collaboration among MIT, Mass General Hospital, EssentialTech, and HealthNovations into SurgiBox, the operating room in a backpack system improving field surgery safety that has won such accolades as the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge and MassChallenge. She remains SurgiBox’s Board President. She also co-founded Harvard’s Medical Makerspace Initiative and the Crimson Care Collaborative Cambridge clinic. Previously, while serving as a physician at Rhode Island’s largest safety-net hospital, she set up the state’s first heart failure randomized controlled trial on cardiac resynchronization therapy, leveraging artificial intelligence techniques. She also spearheads a Brigham-MIT IMES partnership to improve heart pumps. She completed a bachelor’s, master’s, and MD at Harvard; and MEng at Boston University. Her work has been recognized by AAAS’s Science and Human Rights Coalition, US Air Force and Army, USAID, UKAID, and beyond; and featured in diverse settings like the WHO, UN, Doctors Without Borders/UK Royal Society of Medicine, WSJ, NEJM, and London’s Design Museum.