Vivian de Ruijter, MD

Assistant Director, UCSF-STanford PEdiatric Device Consortium
FEllow, Pediatric Health Technology Incubator, Stanford University

Vivian’s health technology innovation journey started early during her medical studies. Despite the satisfaction she found in practicing medicine, she’s always been interested in how to improve it and decided to dedicate her career to advance innovation in healthcare.

She completed several fellowship programs in medical device innovation in parallel and after obtaining her medical degree in the Netherlands, among others at the IRCAD, a world renowned center in minimally invasive surgery in France; at the Stanford General Surgery department, and a Biodesign Innovation Fellowship at the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign. These programs taught her how to identify important unmet healthcare needs through clinical observations, developing innovative diagnostics, therapeutics, devices and digital technologies to address them.

Beyond these foundations, she acquired experience on how to navigate the nuances of bringing those products into patient care by creating clinical, intellectual property, regulatory, reimbursement, business and marketing strategies. Currently, she co-manages the pediatric health technology incubator at Stanford’s Children’s Hospital in order to improve the health and quality of life of pediatric patients by accelerating high-value, high-impact pediatric device solutions at all stages of the product lifecycle.