Carla Pugh is Professor of Surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and Director of the Technology Enabled Clinical Improvement (T.E.C.I.) Center. Her clinical area of expertise is Acute Care Surgery, while her research focuses on the use of simulation and advanced engineering technologies to develop new approaches for assessing and defining competency in clinical procedural skills. She is considered to be a lead, international expert on the use of sensors and motion tracking technology for performance measurement.
Dr. Pugh holds multiple patents on the use of sensor and data acquisition technology to measure and characterize hands-on clinical skills. Currently, over two hundred medical and nursing schools are using one of her sensor enabled training tools for their students and trainees. Her work has received numerous awards from medical and engineering organizations, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2011) and in 2018 she was inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. She holds BS from U.C. Berkeley in Neurobiology, and received her medical degree at Howard University School of Medicine. She also holds a PhD in Education from Stanford University, the first surgeon in the United States to do so.