Now in its second year, the Women in Engineering: Rising Star Awards program continues to recognize outstanding women engineers whose work is redefining innovation and leadership across six core categories: Aerospace/Defense, Automotive/Transportation; Electronics, Manufacturing/Materials; Medical; and Robotics, Automation, and AI. These awards highlight professionals whose achievements not only advance engineering but also inspire the next wave of talent entering the field.
This year’s program once again drew a highly competitive pool of nominations from across the globe. Candidates were evaluated by a panel of judges and editorial staff, with selections based on the strength of their technical contributions, leadership, and impact on industry and society.
The medical category, in particular, reflects the critical role of women in shaping the future of healthcare technologies. Women engineers in this sector are addressing complex challenges through advances in product design, materials, and clinical applications — ultimately improving patient safety and outcomes. Their leadership continues to strengthen decision-making and innovation in an industry where collaboration between engineering and medicine is essential.
The 2025 Medical Rising Star Award recognizes Dr. Debbie Teodorescu, a physician-engineer whose career bridges patient care and technology development. As Founder and Board Director of SurgiBox Inc. and an invasive and heart failure cardiologist, Dr. Teodorescu is advancing surgical safety and cardiovascular innovation, embodying the forward-looking spirit of this award.
Debbie Teodorescu
Founder & Board Director;
Invasive and Heart Failure Cardiologist
SurgiBox Inc., Seattle, WA
EDUCATION: Dr. Debbie Teodorescu earned her MD and a master’s degree from Harvard, and MEng from Boston University; completed her medicine and cardiology training at Brown and Cedars-Sinai; and previously served on Harvard faculty.
EXPERIENCE: Dr. 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
MDB: What’s the most exciting part of your work?
Teodorescu: 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. The patient did OK thanks to the transport team’s troubleshooting. But I love getting to support the growth of safe surgical capacity at the bedside, hopefully reducing risk of such incidents over time.
MDB: What is one major challenge you’ve faced in your career and how did you overcome it?
Teodorescu: 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.
MDB: What advice do you have for young women engineers aspiring to be leaders?
Teodorescu: 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?!”
MDB: What strategies do you use to stay motivated and continue to grow in your field?
Teodorescu: My patients are the ultimate motivator in the fast-moving fields of medicine and medical innovations: they help me stay just dissatisfied enough with the status quo to work avidly on staying up to date, and to consider critically what the future should bring.
MDB: Can you describe a pivotal moment in your career that significantly impacted your trajectory?
Teodorescu: I was fortunate to spend my clinical training and early career in some of the world’s top academic medical centers, working alongside and learning from an incredible array of brilliant, dedicated clinicians. Those ecosystems foster excellence but can also encourage a certain in-group mindset. As I was contemplating a role in a less-academic setting, I talked with one of my mentors, a giant in heart failure innovation. He surprised me by tracing an imaginary map of our medical center in the air between us. These labs here, he pointed out, didn’t exist when he started. That tower? Same. “You’ve clearly never been afraid to build things,” he pointed out. “Wherever you go, help build it to be the best.”
MDB: How do you balance technical expertise with leadership responsibilities in your role?
Teodorescu: Fundamentally, leadership is about trust: both earning it and extending it. Building trust requires demonstrating personal competence and consistently following through on commitments. Extending trust means recognizing the unique strengths and limitations that teammates and collaborators bring to the table. To do both effectively, I have found it essential to develop a strong foundation of technical expertise across a broad range of fields. This allows me to accurately assess what individuals can reasonably be expected to do well, how much effort and time tasks may require, and the range of outcomes that are feasible. In this way, technical knowledge becomes a tool not just for execution, but for enabling good judgment, realistic expectations, and meaningful collaboration.
MDB: What role has mentorship played in your career, and how do you pay it forward?
Teodorescu: Mentors of all types have really been so critical throughout my career and life in general, with some having been part of my journey for over two decades at this point. When I meet people who honor me by asking for advice, I will sometimes share that I have stayed in touch with mentors as far back as high school, so certainly hope to pay it forward with long-running relationships as well, if I can be of assistance.
MDB: SurgiBox bridges innovation and medicine in a very practical way. What inspired you to found the company, and how does your clinical experience as a cardiologist influence its direction?
Teodorescu: Before entering medicine, I worked in biomedical research labs that relied on glove boxes to protect sensitive experiments. When I began medical training, I connected with the individuals who would become my SurgiBox cofounders and advisors: seasoned medical professionals with deep experience in disaster settings and war zones, as well as rigorous academic surgery in Boston. It was and still is deeply unsettling to me that, in many field environments, my old cell cultures were better protected than human patients. That insight became the foundation of SurgiBox, whose name originally came from “surgical glove box.” Although we evolved beyond box shapes and bulky gloves, the name stuck. Fortunately, we began our work just as global awareness of the massive surgical access gap was starting to grow.
One point that may be helpful to clarify: as a cardiologist, I am no surgeon. Like all physicians, I trained across disciplines early in my career, helping to deliver babies, scrub into traumas, and more; but my core contributions to SurgiBox came more from translating surgical colleagues’ needs into design features and technical parameters. At the same time, cardiology’s culture of rapid, high-impact intervention — after all, this is the specialty that pioneered “door-to-balloon” time for heart attacks — shaped my deep appreciation for tools that bring care to the patient, wherever they are. It has been incredibly rewarding to see the growing excitement around the SurgiField system, especially as clinicians imagine its potential for a wide range of procedures at the point of need.
MDB: What were some of the toughest hurdles you faced in bringing SurgiBox to life, and how did you overcome them?
Teodorescu: SurgiBox’s SurgiField platform is a great example of how engineering simplicity takes elegance. Designing and manufacturing a system that respects existing clinical workflows, operates reliably with minimal power, and consistently reduces contamination even in austere settings, takes some elegant engineering and innovation. The platform was built off of several Harvard and MIT theses, as well as a robust intellectual property portfolio. Because SurgiField is such a novel a platform system that offers distinct value propositions to different users — field hospitals vs. on transport vehicles vs. offices vs. critical care bays vs. operating rooms — we have discovered that people often better understand its potential with hands-on experience. “Oh! This isn’t what I expected. I could’ve used this when I had that patient…” To support that kind of discovery, our team collaborates with regional partners and clinician leaders around the world to ensure potential users have the opportunity to experience the system directly.
MDB: As a heart failure specialist, you’re engaged with patients facing complex challenges. How has that perspective shaped your approach to medical innovation and device development?
Teodorescu: In the medtech realm, the critical-thinking individual will often note of a trend or clinical practice, “Well, that just seems weird and ridiculous.” Clinical practice has helped me get comfortable with the reality that things might not always make sense on the surface. For example, a patient might insist on being disconnected from a life-sustaining cocktail of infusions to leave the hospital against medical advice… but it is to be able to say goodbye to a loved one in hospice out of state. I love getting to introduce medical teams to the innovation-world concept of BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) since we deal with that implicitly all the time. In turn, I try to bring the mentality of “meeting things and beliefs where they are” to the innovation realm.
MDB: Your work sits at the intersection of patient care and systemic healthcare innovation. How do you decide when to focus on individual patient outcomes vs. broader technological change?
Teodorescu: It comes down to the core problem at hand, because there are usually multiple ways to tackle it, if the problem is understood correctly. Take the issue of needle sticks for example. With aggressive training and optimization of sharps management practices, the risk of accidental needle stick injury drops dramatically. However, safer sharps and sharps disposal systems were still valuable innovations on top of the good practices, to reduce variability of outcomes and reduce cognitive burden. Similarly, it will still be important for every single patient to watch vigilantly for biofluid splatters and spurts, and maintain excellent hemostasis throughout a procedure; but a technological system that contains splatters still adds value in the same way as with the sharps. Good technologies augment good systems — tech does not excuse us from trying to do the best for each individual patient, but hopefully makes that effort easier, faster, and/or more effective.
MDB: As you look ahead, how do you see your role evolving in mentoring the next generation of physicians and innovators, and what leadership lessons do you most hope to pass on?
Teodorescu: The clinical and innovation ecosystems are packed with both shiny, weird incentives and hordes of monstrous challenges. I have come to understand over time that sometimes for a given person I might just be the mentor that pops in to help with a specific need, while for others I might be a touchpoint throughout their journey. In every case, I hope I help strengthen motivations to keep patients first.
Teodorescu’s work exemplifies how clinical expertise and engineering innovation can come together to address critical gaps in healthcare. Her leadership in advancing surgical safety, cardiovascular innovation, and patient-centered solutions reflects the forward-looking mission of the Rising Star Awards. By blending technical excellence with mentorship and a commitment to patient care, she continues to inspire the next generation of women engineers and physicians to push boundaries and build a more resilient, inclusive future for medtech.
This article was written by Sherrie Trigg, Editor and Director of Content for Medical Design Briefs. She can be reached at
