In an interview with The Bottom Line, Dr. David Haggerty, a recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) and founder of biotechnology startup Vine Medical, walks us through his development of a novel soft robotic intubation device that accomplishes exactly that.
Q: What motivated you to apply your soft robotics expertise to medical-related applications such as intubation procedures?
A: I’d always known I wanted to get into medical technology for a variety of reasons, but just a few months before learning about this problem and its severity, my cousin got in a motorcycle accident and passed away. A couple months later, a physician from Stanford reached out to us about how bad the airway management problem is outside hospital environments, which appears to be a primary contributor to unnecessary morbidity and mortality. It seemed like I had the skill set and interest, and there was this need in the world uniquely relevant to me. And so, it was kind of a perfect match.
Q: How do innovators like yourself balance your expertise in a specialized field with more unfamiliar, technical knowledge that these projects often require?
A: I think that in any new endeavor, you have to start out with humility. There’s a fine line between having confidence in your capability, but humility in your ignorance. You also start using the scientific muscles that one develops through grad school or an advanced degree, which begins with the hypothesis generation process of identifying what you know and what you don’t know. And so, I think the most important thing is a bias to action and a readiness to admit your ignorance in the face of a novel, unclear intellectual landscape.