Physician and Entrepreneur Shares Journey with CEL and BioMed Students

As part of its Founders and Leaders Series, the Sands Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (CEL) welcomed SCH parent Dr. Rajesh Aggarwal P’34 on April 30. Speaking to both CEL and BioMed students, Dr. Aggarwal shared his journey from surgeon and scientist to entrepreneur, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how expertise, innovation, and entrepreneurship converge to transform patient care.

Dr. Aggarwal’s passion for medicine began at age 4, when he watched his father in the operating room. He has since built a formidable career, performing over 6,000 surgical cases and pioneering complex procedures, including the first adolescent bariatric surgery at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. A prolific researcher, he has published over 300 manuscripts focused on virtual reality and robotic surgical technologies.

However, his transition into the startup world was fueled by a desire to help people at a scale the operating room alone could not reach.

“That’s why I do what I do,” Dr. Aggarwal told the audience. “I want to help people.”

His entrepreneurial path includes leading strategic ventures across the UK, Canada, and the US, bridging the gap between high-stakes medicine and scalable technology. In 2020, he joined Panda Health to build a marketplace for digital health procurement, and in 2022, he founded twenty30 health, an AI-powered platform for metabolic care. He now advises and invests in the next generation of digital health startups.

Addressing the students, Dr. Aggarwal emphasized that the core of entrepreneurship is a commitment to significant, shared, and sustained impact. When asked how he manages such a multifaceted career, his advice was simple:

"Do things you are passionate about outside of your work, and spend time with people you love and enjoy being around."

By sharing his trajectory from Imperial College London to the forefront of health tech, Dr. Aggarwal left students with a clear message: The boundaries between medicine and business are disappearing, and those who can navigate both, as well as understand what's next in AI, will define the future of healthcare.