Debbie Teodorescu, Founder of SurgiBox, cites that “Each year 18 million people die from conditions that surgery could have fixed”. In most cases, this results from lack of access to safe, sterile surgery space within a critical Golden Hour that’s necessary for treatment. Watch Debbie’s TEDMED 2018 Hive Talk to discover how she and her team have created a sterile, portable vessel - small enough to fit inside a backpack - that allows for surgery anytime and anyplace.
Debbie Lin Teodorescu is a practicing physician, maker, and researcher passionate about patient-focused innovation. 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. She also co-founded Harvard’s Medical Makerspace Initiative and the Crimson Care Collaborative (CCC) Cambridge clinic. Currently a physician at Lifespan Healthcare, she runs an RCT on cardiac resynchronization therapy and spearheads a BWH-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, Humanitarian Grand Challenges, US Army, MassChallenge, and beyond; and featured in diverse settings like the WHO, WSJ, NEJM, and London’s Design Museum.