Daniel Rosenman was remarkably fit and barely 50 last summer when he and his wife Christine Winoto began imagining what he’d do when he retired some day. As a veteran Bay area medical device engineer and consultant, Rosenman had already been donating time to help pediatricians develop new devices for sick children at UC San Francisco, Winoto’s workplace.
“When I’m retired I’ll probably just give up my time to UCSF,” Winoto remembers her husband saying.
Rosenman never had the chance to carry out that plan. On a mountain bike ride in the hills above Lake Tahoe in late August, Rosenman suffered a fatal heart attack. But his impulse to help less experienced medical device inventors is living on, thanks to a new program at UCSF and a band of his admiring colleagues.
Shortly after Rosenman’s death, UCSF leaders started creating the Rosenman Institute, a new medical device incubator within an existing campus-based bioscience program, QB3. Startups at the new incubator will be advised by more than a dozen volunteer industry experts who quickly signed up to help in Rosenman’s honor. The members are now called the Rosenman Fellows.