You sit at the intersection of critical care cardiology, leadership, and innovation. When you look back, what is a pivotal moment that truly shifted you from excellent clinician
to physician leader
?
I don't naturally think of myself as a leader,
though I'm always deeply honored when others do. For me, it was realizing that clinical excellence alone—even at the highest level—wasn't enough to change outcomes at scale. Early in my career, I could do everything right at the bedside and still watch the same patients cycle through systems that failed them long before they ever reached the CICU. Much of that failure, I came to realize, happens far upstream—and often outside the walls of the hospital entirely.
That realization reframed how I understood leadership. It's not about being the smartest person in the room; it's about redesigning the room itself. It's about recognizing that we all practice within systems, and that improving care means engaging with those systems—not just mastering our individual roles within them.
I have also found that leadership
often reveals itself quietly. Most of the time, you don't realize you're leading at all—you're simply showing up, asking better questions, and creating space for others to do their best work. And in many ways, that's when leadership is most authentic.
You lead in some of the most high-stakes environments in medicine. How do you make decisions when the data are incomplete, the team is under pressure, and the stakes are life-or-death—and what can other physician leaders learn from that?
In the ICU world, despite the large amounts of continuous data we have access to, uncertainty is still a constant factor.
In these moments, I anchor myself in three things to guide my clinical judgement: principles, people, and purpose. Principles guide the non-negotiables—patient dignity, safety, and equity. People matter because no decision is made in isolation; psychological safety and trust allow teams to function under pressure and crowdsource input. And purpose reminds us why we are doing this work.
Practically, I narrate my clinical thinking out loud, invite dissent early, and make decisions with humility—knowing we may need to course-correct. Decisiveness and openness are not opposites. They can be synergistic actually. The strongest leaders create space for input while still providing direction when it matters most. I think in the ICU setting, this is particularly crucial.
You've championed gender equity and health equity on national stages. From a leadership lens, what inequities in medicine concern you most right now—and how do you believe physician leaders should be responding?
Structural inequities persist in promotion, sponsorship, compensation, authorship, and voice, particularly for women and physicians of color. Patients experience disparities in access and outcomes long before they ever enter a clinical encounter. Social determinants, structural bias, and fragmented systems continue to shape who receives timely, high-quality care and who does not.
In many cases, well-intentioned systems continue to reproduce the same outcomes because we fail to interrogate the assumptions beneath them. We have a lot of work to do!
You recently completed an Executive MBA at Wharton while leading clinically and nationally. How has learning the language of business
changed the way you lead teams, influence systems, or think about the future of healthcare?
Learning the language of business has allowed me to translate clinical intuition into strategic rationale and to sit at tables where capital, policy, and innovation decisions are made—not as a guest, but as a peer.
It has sharpened how I think about incentives, scale, and sustainability. I now ask not only, Is this the right thing to do?
but also, Is this designed to endure?
That shift has made me more effective in advocating for clinicians and patients alike, because I can frame impact in terms that decision-makers understand.
Most importantly, I think healthcare transformation requires clinicians who can bridge empathy and economics—without losing the empathy or humanity piece. At the heart of it all (pun intended), I'm a clinician who takes care of humans.
You're involved in digital health and AI, and startups in this area. What do you see as the most important responsibility—and opportunity—for physician leaders as AI tools become embedded in everyday clinical decision-making?
Our responsibility is to ensure AI augments human judgment rather than replaces it.
Physician leaders must be stewards of ethical integration: questioning bias, demanding transparency, and ensuring these tools improve equity rather than exacerbate disparities. At the same time, the opportunity is extraordinary. AI can return time to clinicians, surface insights we couldn't see alone, and perhaps even help standardize excellence across settings.
But that only happens if physicians are at the design table—not reacting after deployment (which, has of course, happened before). Leadership here means curiosity to shape the technology before it shapes us.
For physicians who want to move from doing the work
to truly shaping the system—whether in hospitals, academia, or industry—what mindset shifts or habits have been most essential in your own leadership journey?
Instead of just asking, What's my role?
, ask What's broken—and how can I help fix it?
Equally important has been finding a leadership style that feels authentic. Trying to emulate someone else's voice or approach rarely felt sustainable to me. It needs to be aligned with who you are.
When you think about the next decade of cardiovascular care, what kind of physician leader will the field need—and what do you hope your own leadership legacy will be?
The next decade will require physician leaders who are clinically excellent, emotionally intelligent, technologically fluent, and system-minded. Leaders who can integrate data with humanity, innovation with ethics, and urgency with sustainability.
I fundamentally believe that there is room for many voices, many styles, and many ways of contributing meaningfully in healthcare. If I've helped create environments where people feel seen, supported, and empowered to lead in their own authentic way, then I will have done something that truly lasts.
Mozibox believes that when physicians lead, healthcare advances. We've set an ambitious goal: increase the number of physicians in leadership roles by 50% by 2035. From your perspective, what changes are required to make that possible (at the system level, at the training level and individual level)?
At the system level, we need intentional pathways—not accidental leadership. That means embedding some formal leadership development into our training and career development.
At the training level, leadership education should be normalized and integrated, not treated as a deviation from clinical excellence. The practice of medicine has changed dramatically over the last few decades. If you're coming out of training unable to define an RVU
or VBHC
, maybe we've done a disservice.
At the individual level, physicians must be encouraged to see leadership not as ego or ambition, but as responsibility. We need to reframe leadership as service (not status)—and create communities where emerging leaders are supported, sponsored, and allowed to grow imperfectly. And to always pay it back.
