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Dr. Robert Webster
Dr. Webster is the Richard A. Schroeder Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and holds secondary appointments in Vanderbilt’s Business and Medical Schools. He directs the Medical Engineering and Discovery Laboratory at Vanderbilt, and co-founded the Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering, which brings together physicians and engineers to solve challenging clinical problems via robotics and other engineering approaches. He is a founder and President of Virtuoso Surgical, Inc. and EndoTheia, Inc. which are commercializing technologies invented in his laboratory. He has received career awards from the IEEE, NSF, and RSS, and an award for Excellence in Teaching from Vanderbilt. He teaches a course in Entrepreneurship at Vanderbilt that teams up PhD, MBA, and Law students to study commercialization of university-invented technologies, which has produced 10 real-world startup companies over the past few years.
Dr. Duke Herrell
Duke Herrell provides strategic clinical leadership to the Virtuoso Surgical team. He is a urologic surgeon and pioneer in robotic surgery and minimally invasive surgical approaches. He is a co-founder of the Vanderbilt Institute in Surgery and Engineering (VISE), and active surgeon, and helps lead several Vanderbilt University and VUMC spin-out startups in the medical device space.
Dr. Herrell’s research has focused on creating novel surgical robotic systems and devices for minimally invasive surgery, and his papers have been cited over 3900 times. He is a graduate of the University of Richmond and the University of Virginia School of Medicine.