Frederic Moll

Frederic Moll, born in 1952, is a physician, medical device developer and entrepreneur whose career is built around medical robotics. Both of his parents were pediatricians, and he grew up in Seattle, where he attended Lakeside School, before studying at the University of California at Berkeley and earning his medical degree at the University of Washington. During a surgical residency at Virginia Mason Medical Center in the early 1980s he was struck by how large an incision was needed just to reach the inside of the body, and he left the residency to develop the safety trocar, a device that helped make general laparoscopic surgery possible. He went on to fund and later sell two Silicon Valley equipment companies, Endotherapeutics and Origin Medsystems, served as medical director of Guidant's surgical division, and in 1995 left to found Intuitive Surgical with John Freund and Rob Younge, the company behind the da Vinci system for robot-assisted surgery. He later led Hansen Medical, co-founded Auris Surgical Robots in 2007 and joined Johnson and Johnson after its 2019 acquisition of Auris Health.