Catherine Mohr facts for kids

Catherine Jane Mohr, born in New Zealand in 1968, is a medical researcher living in the United States. She is known for developing special robots that help doctors perform surgery with smaller cuts. This helps patients recover faster. She also designed fuel cells for vehicles and studied how to build eco-friendly buildings. Today, she teaches at Stanford Medical School and leads the Intuitive Foundation. This foundation is part of Intuitive Surgical, a company that makes surgical robots.

Early Life and Family

Catherine Mohr was born Catherine Jane Anderson in Dunedin, New Zealand. Her mother was a biostatistician, someone who uses math to study health. Her father was a biochemist, who studies the chemistry of living things. When Catherine was very young, her family moved to the United States. Her father wanted to do more research there.

Her parents always planned to move back to New Zealand. However, they could not find jobs in the same place. So, Catherine grew up in the US, but she kept her New Zealand citizenship.

Catherine met her husband, Paul Mohr, in 2000. She had broken her pelvis in a horseback riding accident. She had to stay still for six weeks. Her friends visited often, and that is how she and Paul started their relationship. They have a daughter named Natalie.

Education and Early Interests

Catherine Mohr loved to tinker and race bicycles when she was young. In high school, she worked as a bicycle mechanic near Boston. When she started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she planned to study chemistry.

During her second year, she and a friend started a solar car racing team. Catherine realized she loved building and fixing things. She changed her major to mechanical engineering. She stayed on the solar car team until she graduated. She helped race cars in the US and worked on a car for a race in Switzerland. In 1987, she raced in Australia's first World Solar Challenge. This race went from Darwin to Adelaide. Her designs for solar car wheels won an award at MIT. Megan Smith, who later became the Chief Technology Officer for the United States, was also on her team.

After getting her first degree in mechanical engineering, Catherine continued her studies at MIT. She earned her Master's degree in 1992. Her master's project was about designing a small robot wrist and hand. She had planned to get a Ph.D., but she decided to leave school. She wanted to work on electric cars instead.

In 1999, Catherine decided to go to medical school. She took classes at UCLA to prepare. Then, she started at Stanford University School of Medicine. She earned her Doctor of Medicine degree in 2006. However, she chose not to become a practicing doctor.

Career in Engineering and Medicine

Catherine Mohr has always been busy, starting from her days as a bike mechanic.

At MIT, she helped teach classes and worked on research projects. She helped design a bicycle light powered by a crank. She also worked on special knee braces. After MIT, she worked on electric cars. She became a program manager for Rod Millen in California. Then, she joined AeroVironment, working with Paul MacCready. There, she developed fuel cells and hybrid batteries for cars and high-flying airplanes. She even started a lab to create fuel cell systems for planes that could stay in the air for months.

After five years, Catherine thought about her career path. She once said that engineering is about "improving the human condition." In the mid-1990s, hybrid or electric cars were not available to buy. This made her wonder if her work was making a real difference for people.

She then watched doctors test new medical devices during surgeries. She saw that sometimes the technology did not work well. She realized that engineers needed to understand the human body better to design good medical tools. This led her to decide to go to medical school.

While in medical school, Catherine noticed that doctors were becoming very interested in using robots for surgery. She studied tools for surgery that use small cuts. She also helped with laparoscopic surgeries, which are done through tiny incisions. She even helped create a laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass procedure. This procedure became part of the da Vinci Surgical System. This system was developed by Intuitive Surgical, where she would later work.

During medical school, Catherine also started her own company called Veresure. She wanted to sell a tool she invented called the LapCap. This tool made laparoscopic surgery safer. In this type of surgery, doctors need to lift the abdominal wall. This prevents them from harming organs like the intestines. Before her invention, doctors used towel clips. Catherine invented a bell-shaped device that uses suction to lift the abdominal wall. She sold her company in 2006.

Since 2006, Catherine Mohr has been a professor at Stanford Medical School. She studies how to use simulations to train surgeons. She has also taught at Singularity University since 2009.

In 2001, her husband was already working for Intuitive Surgical. Catherine was interested in how robots could make surgery less stressful for the body. She suggested that her mentors at medical school try the da Vinci robot. She started advising Intuitive Surgical and later joined them full-time.

She worked as Director, then Senior Director, and Vice President of Medical Research. She continued to work on ways to reduce stress on the body during surgery. She also explored new surgical technologies. These included ways to destroy tumors and special infrared vision markers. She then became Vice President of Strategy for about three years. In 2018, she created the Intuitive Foundation.

Catherine also advises new companies in the U.K., the U.S., and New Zealand. She is a member of several engineering and science groups.

Patents and Awards

Catherine Mohr is listed as the inventor on about forty patents for medical devices. This means she has created many new tools and technologies that are protected by law.

She has received many awards and honors for her work:

• In 2012, she was named one of the "Nifty Fifty" science mentors by the USA Science and Engineering Festival.
• In 2014, she was the first woman to be included in the New Zealand Hi-Tech Hall of Fame.
• She was recognized as a World Class New Zealander in 2014.
• In 2015, she won the NEXT Woman of the Year awards in the Health and Sciences category.
• In 2020, she was named a Woman of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. This was for her work in getting personal protective equipment for medical workers during the early COVID-19 pandemic.

Hobbies and Other Interests

Catherine Mohr was an enthusiastic motorcyclist even before she drove cars much. She enjoys scuba diving, traveling, and cooking. While in medical school, she invented a machine that could stamp designs onto chocolate coins.

In 2011, Catherine started playing the cello. She once said that "one should always be a beginner at something."

Besides her main career, she became very interested in green architecture. This is about designing buildings that are good for the environment. She became an expert in this field.

She has given several TED Talks. These talks covered topics like robotic surgery and green architecture. She also spoke about a diving accident involving a sea urchin that happened just before her horseback riding accident.