2024 Rosenman RISE Program Awardee

Bio: Dr. Maria Artunduaga is a physician-scientist and inventor with 60-plus prizes, publications, and patents. A top medical student and doctor in Colombia, her country of birth, she completed a Harvard post-doc in genetics. Still, she abandoned a plastic surgery residency at UChicago and dedicated herself to addressing early detection of lung deterioration in the thirty million Americans who suffer from COPD. When Maria, who comes from a medical family, lost her grandmother to COPD, she understood the inadequacy of current methods to diagnose and treat COPD exacerbations on time. She founded Samay (“to breathe deeply” in Quechua) and raised $4.1M to build an AI-powered management platform to treat COPD in the home more efficiently and cost-effectively. She completed an MPH at the University of Washington and an MTM at UC Berkeley/UCSF to prepare for this venture. She now manages a diverse, multi-national, multilingual team of 15 engineers, designers, and data scientists on a more than full-time basis. She lives in Mountain View, Calif., with her toddler daughter, husband, and two pets. She maintains a passion for flamenco singing and dancing and a dedication to fostering diversity inside and outside the workplace.