Maria Artunduaga, MD, MPH, MTM

Maria is the Founder and CEO of Respira Labs.

An accomplished physician-scientist turned entrepreneur, Maria graduated top of her class from Colombia’s premier Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, ranked fifth among Latin American medical schools. She moved to the United States to pursue postdoctoral training, first at Harvard’s Department of Genetics then at the universities of Washington and California in Berkeley-San Francisco, where she obtained master's degrees in Public Health and Translational Medicine respectively.

As a former plastic and reconstructive surgery candidate at the University of Chicago, Maria’s clinical interests remain at the intersection of medicine, technology, policy, and education. She believes her multifaceted training has been crucial for her newly minted entrepreneurship career. Maria has over 12 years of combined clinical, research and technology experience, during which she has led operations for multidisciplinary teams at Harvard Medical School, the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) and Haas School of Business.

Maria has been awarded 20 grants, scholarships and prizes, has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine and Nature; and has presented her work internationally. She also is a peer reviewer for scientific journals in her native Colombia. Currently, Maria is a full-time entrepreneur, selected to complete LAUNCH, Haas School of Business's most competitive accelerator program.