Published on the 27/11/2014 | Written by Newsdesk

This week the NZ Hi-Tech Trust inducted surgical robotics technologist Dr Catherine Mohr into its Hall of Fame, making her the first woman to receive such recognition…

Dr Catherine Mohr is a surgical robotics technologist and director of medical research for Intuitive Surgical based in San Francisco. The NZ Hi-Tech Trust says the Flying Kiwi award recognises her lifetime achievement in the emerging technologies industry and her work with surgical robots and minimally invasive surgery.

The announcement was made at a lunch at Auckland’s Hilton Hotel, attended by fellow Flying Kiwi recipients and illustrious members of the New Zealand hi-tech community at which Hi-Tech Trust Chairman Wayne Norrie described the New Zealand technology industry as being at its most vibrant in the seven years he has been involved with the trust.

Dr Mohr, who is based in San Francisco, was not able to attend the ceremony in person, but those who have met her spoke not only of her considerable achievements but also her warmth, inspiration and charisma. Indeed, this was evident in the video message and interview that was broadcast at the event.

Interview with Dr Catherine Mohr

1. Tell us about how you came to be involved in the Hi-Tech industry and what goals and ambitions you had at the time?
I first became interested in tech when I was looking at sustainable transportation – electric cars, hybrid electric vehicles. I, at the time, worked for a company called AeroVironment and we wanted to save the world. The motto of the company was “imagine the impossible and do it” and we wanted to build the next generation of transportation. In a later incarnation in my role in tech I was working at, and currently am working at, Intuitive Surgical Robotics. What we are trying to do is bring minimally invasive surgery to procedures where otherwise open surgery would be the only option. These seem like radically different things but in both cases I want to bring systems thinking and broad problem-based solving to problems that really effect people.

2. You undoubtedly faced a number of hurdles that you had to overcome, especially in your early days. Can you tell us about some of these, how you overcame these, and the lessons learned?
We all have hurdles when we are growing and developing in whatever our career is going to be. In my case I started as an engineer and I don’t think I noticed the hurdles that other people were putting in my way. Some people sometimes wonder whether I had trouble as a woman in engineering and I really didn’t find that there were a lot of people that were pushing back, saying “no, as a woman you can’t do that”. The hurdles that I found were the hardest were the ones that I would put in my own way; where I would doubt that I could do something. This tends to happen a lot with very driven people. We have this ‘imposter syndrome’ that’s going in the back of our heads where we are thinking “I’ve just got to keep moving forward and just hope that they don’t find out that I’m not actually as qualified as I am [sic]”. And it’s these sorts of things that are the most difficult to overcome: the hurdles that other people put up for you are easier to knock down than the ones you put up for yourself.

3. What factors do you believe have contributed to your success?
I think in some ways, when we try to think about success and achieving it, one of the things that I talk to students and young people about the most is making sure that they maintain a love of learning. That has been what has guided me and been essentially the fuel for my rocket ship all the way along. I’m not invested in knowing the answer and being the person who has the answer readily, but I love finding out the answer. Admitting that you don’t know in a group of people can feel like a very vulnerable position but I have found that it is a very powerful position. It’s one where we start to learn and get to the next step, instead of just stagnating in what we know right now. So I would say the thing that really has been the engine for success is a love of learning and being willing to be on the steep part of the learning curve, willing to wade in to something where I feel relatively ignorant and I can go and learn about it.

4. Who have been your key supporters over the years?
In the growth of anyone’s trajectory in their career often people come in contact with others who are supportive, who see that spark and want to bring it out. I’ve been blessed with having many mentors over the years, from a professor at university who, when I was initially a chemistry major saw that I really loved tinkering, that I loved building things and really showed me that I was a mechanical engineer at heart. I had others who believed that I could then be the kind of creative and design-based person that I’ve never really thought of myself as and it was they that encouraged me along the way. In the transition to medical school, there were people who I went to study with and who were very generous of their time and talked to me about the problems within medicine that we could solve with technology. I, in turn, try to turn around and help students that are coming along and people that are trying to find their own way, and I think that’s a very important part – not just receiving the mentoring but recognising that you can be the mentor as well.

5. What do you see as the challenges facing the New Zealand hi-tech industry and how do you think we need to approach tackling these?
New Zealand is an isolated country and, as New Zealand is trying to find its way into the global tech economy, there are some things about tech that are uniquely suited. In tech you don’t have to have a face-to-face interaction with the customer – you can interact through the products, so that works very well. But on the flipside of that New Zealand businesses have to scale so rapidly and have to get out in to multiple customers that being able to figure out what’s going to be that magic alchemy of getting it in front of customers without having to physically go there while leveraging the unique Kiwi talents that are here – that’s a difficult path to thread. But it’s one that many companies have been doing successfully and we’re still trying to figure out what that alchemy is. Once we’ve got it I think we’ll be in good shape.

6. What do think are the strengths of the New Zealand hi-tech industry and how do you think we should leverage these?
Coming back to New Zealand as an adult professional one of the things that strikes me is the incredible creativity and intellectual quality of the students that are here in the universities in New Zealand. And it’s this raw material, this spark, these ideas, this incredible ability that is going to be the engine of New Zealand’s hi-tech industry growth. We have to figure out how we are going to partner them with people – your PhDs aren’t going to run the companies, you want people in the business world partnering with them. We’ve got to get out of the solo person mindset and think in terms of teams and in terms of fostering teams. When we bring the people that are thinking about business scale this is really going to leverage the strengths that we’ve got here in New Zealand.

7. What advice do you have for start-ups?
One of the most important things when you are trying to design or think about what a good business would be is to be focused on a problem that matters. So often people think “I can make an app that will exploit an inefficiency in a market” and when that inefficiency disappears your business disappears. Working on the important, lasting problems is the way to build a foundation that you can then grow your business globally from. And if the problem is worth solving in New Zealand, it’s probably worth solving overseas as well. Too many young entrepreneurs are thinking “I’m going to flip a quick app and I’m thinking about my exit and then I’m going to go on and do something else” – building lasting businesses is about focusing on problems that matter.

8. What is the single thing you are most proud of?
I’ve had a very varied career, from working in alternative energy to now working in surgical robotics and I have all of these very interesting hobbies in terms of green building and thinking about vaccine delivery. The common thread among all of these things is appropriate application of technology to help the human condition. So when I look back across these things and I look forward to the kind of things I’m looking forward to doing in the future, the thing I’m most proud of is that, at various points along the way, I was able to look at the systems that these technologies were operating within (and to look at the cultures and communities within which they were operating) and see into the future a few years to see how these technologies would play out. And I believe it’s’ that kind of systems thinking and ability to see the big picture that I’m most proud of.

9. Being based in the US how do you remain connected with New Zealand?
One of the things that has been really wonderful for me recently is being able to reconnect to the New Zealand tech community. I’ve been able to do this through many different vehicles: direct connections with New Zealand Trade & Enterprise, the Kea Network which has been very active at bringing ex-pats back in. As someone who grew up in the United States and has only been re-engaged professionally in later life this has been invaluable. And as I’ve been brought back in, I’ve been contacting many researchers within the universities, and in some cases sponsoring research at the University of Auckland and others where there’s unique things happening here in technology in New Zealand that I, as a person working in Silicon Valley, want to be able to take advantage of. So the multiple avenues that are available are certainly making it easier to come, and I’m looking forward to more fruitful co-productions and research partnerships in the future.

More on Mohr

Born in Dunedin, Dr Mohr moved to the United States as a child but has maintained her New Zealand citizenship and strong links with the country. She received her Bachelors and Masters of Science in mechanical engineering from MIT and was a founding member of the university’s solar car team. Following her studies, she then Mohr returned to study nine years later at Stanford University School of Medicine, saying she needed to know more about the human body in order to be able to work at the intersection of engineering and medicine.

In addition to her work at Intuitive Surgical, she has served as a scientific advisor for several start-up companies in Silicon Valley and government programmes here in New Zealand. Dr Mohr has over a dozen patents to her name, is the author of numerous scientific publications, and has TED talks that have been viewed over one million times.