The Global Medical Innovation MBE program has an extended network of academic, medical, and industry professionals and institutions, both nationally and internationally.
Advisors
Steve Burpee – Burpee Materials Technology
Steve is a chemical engineer with 30 years experience in medical devices and aerospace materials. After 10 years in aerospace R&D, Steve left to pursue a graduate degree and then resumed work in processing and manufacturing of vascular devices. Steve joined Isostent as Principal Scientist where he developed brachytherapy (radiation emitting) stents until the company was acquired by Cordis Corporation. Shortly thereafter, he and wife Janet formed BMT to provide engineering development to the stent industry. Within two years, BMT began small-scale manufacturing of next generation stents using self-financed equipment in a garage in Long Branch, NJ. Over the last 14 years, BMT has been the developer and first manufacturer of a multitude of significant vascular devices. Steve has lead or managed the process development underlying BMT’s manufacturing technology. More recently, Steve manages the company’s efforts in manufacturing technology and new business development. He holds degrees in Chemical Engineering from Rice and Princeton.
Paul Fearis – Clinvue
Paul obtained Masters Degrees in both mechanical engineering and industrial design and as a consequence has been involved in product development throughout his career. As Technology Director at London based PDD Ltd he helped bring a steady stream of medical and consumer products to market before moving to Sagentia Group in the mid-90’s to help build the product development capability there. It was in this role he was named in the Smart100 by SmartCEO Magazine. Years of innovation and product development consulting followed; to both Fortune 500 and start-up companies around the world, with Paul becoming increasingly immersed in the development of innovation tools, processes and thought leadership. An entrepreneur at heart, Paul always sought the opportunity to start a new business and in Jonathan and Brandon found the outstanding partners he was seeking, leading to the formation of Clinvue, a company which marries his passion for innovation with his love of understanding people, solving worthwhile problems and giving back through its partnership with Starlight Children’s Foundation.
Chester Koh, M.D. – Texas Children’s Hospital
Dr. Koh’s clinical area of expertise and interest is in minimally invasive surgery in children for their pediatric urologic conditions, especially with robotic surgery and single incision laparoscopic surgery. He is the director of the Pediatric Robotic Surgery Program, which serves as a pediatric robotic surgery research and training center that collaborates with the other institutions in the Texas Medical Center. Dr. Koh also serves as a principal investigator and founding co-director of a FDA-supported pediatric medical device consortium (the Southern California Center for Technology and Innovation in Pediatrics (CTIP)), a pediatric medical device consortium that is based in Los Angeles and which includes Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine (www.txctip.com). This 5 year grant from the FDA’s Office of Orphan Product Development is dedicated to improving children’s health by supporting the development of innovative pediatric medical devices through all of the necessary stages.
Maria Oden, Ph.D. – Rice University
Maria Oden is Professor in the Practice in the Department of Bioengineering and Director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. She coordinates the technical design efforts of undergraduates participating in the Beyond Traditional Borders initiative and Global Health Technologies minor. She has developed and taught a two-semester Bioengineering Capstone Design course sequence, mentoring close to 1000 students and more than 200 design teams. Her student teams have filed for more than 10 patents on their inventions. Professor Oden’s prior research and teaching experiences were in the area of orthopedic biomechanics and computational modeling as a senior research associate at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, an instructor at Harvard Medical School, and a faculty member at the UT Health Science Center at Houston. She earned a B.S. and Ph.D. from Tulane University.
Mehdi Razavi, M.D. – Texas Heart Institute
Dr. Mehdi Razavi joined Hall-Garcia Cardiology Associates in 2004. He attended medical school at the Medical College of Pennsylvania. He subsequently completed his residency, cardiology fellowship, and electrophysiology fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He was an Associate Professor of Medicine at Penn State University School of Medicine for one year prior to moving to Houston where he holds the same title at Baylor College of Medicine. He is also a Research Scientist at the Texas Heart Institute. Over the last two years he has been the lead or senior author of five manuscripts published in peer-reviewed journals in the field of cardiac electrophysiology. He recently received the Outstanding Faculty Award at Texas Heart Institute. Dr. Razavi has authored a textbook chapter on the mechanisms of sudden cardiac death and has given many presentations in the field of pharmacological treatment of arrhythmias. Dr. Razavi is involved with numerous clinical trials assessing the efficacy of cutting edge technology in the field of cardiac electrophysiology. Dr. Razavi is Board Certified in Cardiology and Cardiac Electrophysiology.
Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Ph.D. – Rice University
Rebecca Richards-Kortum is the Chair and Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University. In 2007, she established Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health Technologies, and in 2005, with the support of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, she founded Rice 360º’s undergraduate educational initiative, Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB). The BTB curriculum has been institutionalized at Rice as an undergraduate minor in global health technologies. Dr. Richards-Kortum’s research lab develops miniature imaging systems to enable better screening for oral, esophageal, and cervical cancer and their precursors at the point of care in low-resource settings. Her group also works to integrate advances in nanotechnology and microfabrication to develop novel, low-cost sensors to detect infectious diseases, including cryptosporidium, malaria, and tuberculosis. In 2008, she was inducted into the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. She is also a fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Mark Zdeblick, Ph.D. – Proteus Digital Health
Mark Zdeblick is chief technologist and co-founder of Proteus Digital Health, and leads the group innovating on our technology. Previously, Mark served as the chief technology officer for the optical switch group at K2 Optronics and served as founder and chief technology officer of Redwood Microsystems. Mark holds a B.S. in civil engineering and a B.A. in architecture, both from the University of Illinois, and an M.S. in aeronautics and astronautics and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
Partners