Karen Koening

Prior to Vicarious, Karen was Director of Mechanical Engineering at Johnson & Johnson in the Robotics and Digital Solutions group. She joined J&J as part of its acquisition of Verb Surgical, a surgical robotics startup and joint venture between J&J and Google. Karen joined Verb as employee 5, bringing initial system technology developed at SRI to the new company and helping grow the company to over 400 in her role as technical lead for their robotic arm development program. Before Verb, Karen worked at SRI International on surgical robotics but also on projects ranging from efficient humanoid walking to silent robotic floor cleaning devices, and self-sterilizing catheters to low-cost robotic components and variable transmissions.

Prior to joining SRI full-time, Karen worked as an engineering fellow with the MISTRAL pediatric medical device consortium, working alongside surgeons at Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford to design and develop medical devices to address unmet needs. She graduated with a MS Engineering degree from Stanford’s Joint Program in Design, and prior to that earned a BS in Physics from Harvey Mudd College.