S. Duke Herrell, MD ’90, Res ’96, is a professor of urologic surgery and engineering at Vanderbilt. He is also a co-founder of Virtuoso Surgical Inc. (VSI), an early phase startup out of Vanderbilt, that is developing and commercializing a revolutionary robotic scope platform with dexterous instruments with a wide range of specialty uses including urology, gynecology, pulmonary, and neurosurgery. VSI’s launch was supported by NIH SBIR and STTR grants and is continuing actively in raising further capital. The start up was named to “10 Top Surgical Solutions of 2020” and the technology is the cover story of the July 2020 issue of MedTech Outlook.

Dr. Herrell is a pioneer in robotic surgery and image-guided surgery. In addition, he has two active NIH RO1s research grants at Vanderbilt as a PI investigating additional engineering solutions to advance surgical treatments in a variety of fields.