How a teenage Gary Guthart, Intuitive Surgical ’ s CEO, got his start at NASA

Today Gary Guthart is best known as the CEO of Intuitive Surgical (NSDQ:ISRG), the world’s leading medical robotics company. But robot-assisted surgery wasn’t Guthart’s first love, he told MassDevice.com ahead of his keynote appearance at this year’s DeviceTalks West event. That honor goes to NASA (or, more properly, science). During his teenage years growing up in Sunnyvale, Calif., Guthart told us, he landed a job at the space agency that helped shape the course of his life. Don’t miss Gary Guthart’s keynote appearance Dec. 11 at DeviceTalks West! “I was a shy kid and a good math student. It turns out I had a knack for math,” Guthart recalled. “Then, my senior year of high school, a calculus teacher said, ‘Hey, I am going to sign you up for an internship.’ He actually signed me up without telling me. “I wound up in a human factors research lab run by a woman named Sandra Hart. I wrote software for evaluating the performance of combat pilots when under stress,” he said. Guthart never looked back, he added. “I decided, ‘I can’t believe I get paid to do this.’ I got to ride my bike onto, it was at that time a Naval base and a NASA base, so I had a little security clearance and rode through the little armed gates and got to watch experimental aircraft fly in and out of the base and meet shuttle pilots – and all as a teenager,” he said. “I thought, ‘I am in....
Source: Mass Device - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Featured Robotics DeviceTalks West Intuitive Surgical Source Type: news