Debbie Teodorescu
Founder and Board Director
SurgiBox Inc.; Invasive & Heart Failure Cardiologist
Seattle, WA
EXPERIENCE
Dr. Debbie Lin Teodorescu is a physician-engineer. She founded SurgiBox Inc., a multinational company transforming surgical safety at point of need. Dr. Teodorescu practices cardiology at Pulse Heart Institute, where she leads cardiovascular research and innovation. She collaborates with Cedars A2I and MIT TTDD to improve ICU monitoring, cardiomyopathy care, and dysautonomia management. She earned her MD and a Master’s from Harvard, and MEng from BU; completed her medicine and cardiology training at Brown and Cedars-Sinai; and previously served on Harvard faculty.
What’s the most exciting part of your work?
Getting to fight for my patients with what we’ve got right now — and also working on growing the armory through research and innovation. One of my scariest moments in medical training was seeing a critically ill burn patient get disconnected from their ventilator en route back to the operating room. Patient did OK thanks to the transport team’s troubleshooting. But I love getting to support growth of safe surgical capacity at the bedside, hopefully reducing risk of such incidents over time.
What is one major challenge you’ve faced in your career and how did you overcome it?
Working across disciplines as a physician-engineer has sometimes meant not fitting neatly into traditional silos. I am far from unique in that challenge, given how the medical technology field pulls expertise from such a huge range of disciplines. I have been fortunate to get to work with institutions that value both clinical excellence and boundary-pushing innovation, and support my growth in tandem.
What advice do you have for young women engineers aspiring to be leaders?
Figure out what rules and boundaries that you cannot break, that you can break (usually at some cost), and that you must break. Proceed accordingly. This is not unique to the young, nor women, nor engineers, who aspire to be leaders. But I have seen myself and many far more brilliant, young women engineers exclaiming retrospectively or deep into a situation, “I could have just asked? Or just DONE IT?!”
