Debbie Teodorescu AB '11 AM '11 MD '16 MEng

When I was at Harvard, I studied History and Science, and it was really rewarding. It’s amazing to be going from analyzing Latin in manuscripts and trying to decipher merchants’ handwriting to jumping to work in the lab with next-generation DNA sequencing. I went straight through to Harvard Medical School in the New Pathways program. Obviously you work hard in Medical School, but you also start to get the sense that you’re the master of your own destiny. In medical school, I also got started working on what would become my company, SurgiBox. 

HMS Student / SurgiBox Intern Akash on his first day with SurgiBox

Back then, our curriculum was still based on subject-by-subject, so we had blocks of physiology and anatomy etc. My tutorial leader was Dr. Stephen Odom, an amazing surgeon who did his best to teach us anatomy. But at the end of it, there’s only so much you can really go through in class, because the rest you really have to learn yourself or with dissection partners. When we finished our cases early, he would tell us about his work in places like Mali and Haiti -  it was around the earthquake at the time – and how there was this real need for surgery to improve and save lives. The lack of sterile environments becomes a big problem as soon as you get out of a very small elite part of the world like the cities in the US. Since I had spent so much time working with glove boxes before in an experimental setting to protect cell cultures and the like, I thought—why don’t we just have a glove box over the patient and operate through there? There was this paradigm that people who had been working in the field longer were used to — this idea that if I wanted to have a safe space, it meant I would have to create a fancy operating room I’d have to lug around in a tent or truck or trailer or plane. No one had really stopped to think, however, that you’re not trying to keep the entire room sterile per se. Instead, if you focus your solution on the patient, that could be enough. So we spent the next few years implementing just that patient-centered sterile field, and in the interim, I also went to get a master’s degree in engineering.

SurgiBox in action

I got to spend almost all those years building up what would become SurgiBox. I had thought people had not done this before because there was no interest, but we found out that was not true—folks from Doctors Without Borders and the military among others leapt on it, and we had wonderful supporters from almost the very beginning. We also proved that the system is efficient to get and keep clean, and I was later able to present this at conferences and other social innovation events like forums. HMS was incredibly supportive too. They knew students were always doing ‘crazy’ things like inventing vaccines against cholera or building a clinic in an under-resourced area, so why not invent something that people need?

Even though medicine is generally hierarchical, with innovation people were incredibly welcoming. It was also important to have good mentors along the way, and it really made this whole journey possible. I have also gotten the time to build up my clinical career and go through the rest of medical training - so with a lot of support and an amazingly passionate team, I have found it possible to give my 110% in patient care, while also being deeply engaged in SurgiBox.

Debbie and colleague, Macauley at SurgiBox manufacturing line

By the time it was my last year of Medical School, we won the President’s Challenge, and that along with Humanitarian Grand Challenges formed seed funding for us to actually commercialize our technology. That’s been really fun, and it involves building a full-time team, especially as I was going on to residency. Our team incorporates physicians, nurses, and everyone from the healthcare sector like engineers, designers, and even policy-maker folks. And this also entailed some interesting adventures. I remember the night we voted on our first real funding deal past initial seed funding. I cast my vote on the deal that would turn us into a multimillion dollar company, while wearing rumpled scrubs, sitting in my car parked outside the hospital in the dark parking lot, post-call. 

Interdisciplinary work happens in a lot of different ways. It’s more than just bringing in people from different disciplines to a single location. Medicine, and Harvard institutions in general, actually has taught me really well about this. When I was on faculty at Mass General Hospital, the nurses and therapists etc were not just tack-ons to your team, but fully contributing members as well as mentors. They were a reminder that oftentimes you don’t know what you don’t know. In the wards, I always strive to listen carefully to what people have to say and contribute, and I think about how this changes what I already understand. It’s all about being open and having the humility to listen. I try really hard to do that on the wards, and I also try very hard to do that when I’m working on SurgiBox.

Healthcare is now moving to more team-based care, so it’s extremely rare—or at least in very few settings—that you have a primary care physician who knows a patient for their entire lives. Because of how super specialized medical knowledge is, I try to approach it from big questions like what’s the right thing for the patient. If you were in their shoes, what would you want your doctor to be doing? Also from a professional standpoint, I always try to talk to people at their level—whether it is at the descriptive level of information that they can understand or physically kneeling to be face-to-face with them when they’re in bed. Our healthcare system is already so confusing to patients! It’s important to establish and be really clear about what your role is on the team, and what other people’s roles are as well, so patients get how we are all working together to help them.

The one thing that I have realized over time is that my history and science degree has been more relevant than I ever expected. I spend so much of my time processing the massive amounts of often conflicting and always incomplete information that we have available. And that happened a lot in history and science, like when we were processing archives from Southern France. We had to go through the data and try to piece it together the best we could. That’s the single biggest overlap I see from my different hats.

There are many mentors I am grateful for. I had finished residency, gone onto general medicine faculty, and then I applied for cardiology fellowship two years later. When I was applying, there were these really, really wholesome and amazing people I had first met as much as a decade before who I reached out to. A few that come to mind include my former attendings Drs. Eli Gelfand, Neal Lakdawala, Leonard Lilly, Joseph Loscalzo, Melissa Mattison, Mandeep Mehra, Jeremy Richards, and so many other generous clinicians. They not only inspired consistently with their excellence as clinicians and trailblazers of all stripes; but also provided and continue to provide concrete advice as well as support.

It’s always about the patients. I remember it was a bit melodramatic on the first day of clinical training when one of the attendings said it’s never going to be about you again, it’s always going to be about what’s the right thing for the patients. But it’s true. This doesn’t mean you’re giving yourself up completely, but it’s just thinking about prioritization. The other important piece of advice I have leaned on a lot over the years is that it gets better. Every stage is painful at least some of the time, and you have to go through a slog of interviews and applications and twists and turns and ups and downs, but it always keeps getting better. At every stage, you progress along your career and because it’s built to have more flexibility as you go along, you can tailor your life and your career to your desires and interests.

One of the things I most appreciate about the Harvard ecosystem is the focus on trainees – and the belief in lifelong learning. You don’t necessarily feel it when you’re going through the training, but over time you appreciate the extent to which your teams constantly push you to be your best self and how you were able to see the sickest and most complex cases. That’s an extraordinary opportunity and to build that up over time, that’s special!

Debbie Lin Teodorescu 

AB History and Science | 2011

AM History of Science | 2011

MEng | Biomedical (Cardiopulmonary) Engineering | 2015 (BU)

MD | 2016

Founder, SurgiBox

Cardiology Fellow, Cedars-Sinai

Interviewed and Compiled by Felicia Ho