'It makes compelling sense to bring engineering, medicine together'

Dr Roderic Pettigrew is the CEO of EnHealth and inaugural Dean of the School of Engineering Medicine, which offers a unique educational programme, EnMed, launched by Texas A&M University in collaboration with Houston Methodist to integrate engineering into all health-related disciplines. Pettigrew was founding director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, at the National Institutes of Health, U.S. A PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1977), Pettigrew has done pioneering work in developing cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging. Physicist, physician and engineer, Pettigrew is a fellow of many prestigious academies of science, medicine and engineering in the U.S. He is also a foreign fellow of The National Academy of Sciences, India. He promoted Stanford-India Biodesign during its creation in 2007, a collaborative effort between Stanford University, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, to identify and train first-generation innovation leaders to help India's nascent medtech industry. Excerpts from an interview: