Catherine Liao is well-known to the sensors universe as a passionate technologist and entrepreneur. At this year's Best of Sensors Awards, she also earned the distinction of Woman of the Year.
Her title at CardieX is Chief Strategy and Commercial Officer, but that alone does not convey her rich background, including with the World Health Organization and at Blumio, where she served as co-founder and CEO. CardieX purchased Blumio in 2022. She has also served in roles at Cisco and Riverbed.
At the awards ceremony at the 40th anniversary of Sensors Converge 2025, marketing head Charlene Soucy noted Liao's "uncanny ability to recognize the white space where technology can be uses to solve unmet needs." She also called out Liao's intuition, hustle and know-how and her work as a program lead for the Startup Leadership Program.
Fierce caught up with Catherine Liao for her thoughts on innovation, women in engineering, and advice for young technologists:
Catherine, you've enjoyed a long career in health-related tech, and even worked at WHO early on with its web infrastructure. What drives you?
What drives me is using technology to solve meaningful problems. Whenever I see something not working well, whether it is a tool, a process, or a system, I always ask why it was built that way and how I can help to improve it.
At the WHO, I used web caching technologies to scale the organization’s website so it could handle a more than 20-fold surge in traffic during an epidemic, growing from 600,000 daily visits to over 14 million, so critical health information reached the people who needed it.
At Cisco, I applied data compression to help healthcare organizations transmit massive imaging files between hospital sites so doctors could review them quickly.
At Blumio, I developed radio frequency technology to detect the pulsing of arteries and measure blood pressure without a cuff. Now at Cardiex, I am combining everything I have learned to detect changes in the arteries earlier and identify heart disease sooner.
Here's a challenge: How would you explain SphygmoCor technology to an 8th grader?
Your arteries are like flexible garden hoses that carry blood from your heart to the rest of your body. When you are young and healthy, they are soft and springy. Over time, daily wear and tear, aging, or certain health problems can make them stiff, like a hose left out in the sun. We can see ourselves aging on the outside by looking in a mirror, but we cannot see how we are aging on the inside.
SphygmoCor is our technology that can take a signal from your arm, wrist, or finger and show what that inner wear and tear looks like, so doctors can catch problems early and help keep your heart and arteries healthier for longer.
SphygmoCor has been used all over the world to study hundreds of thousands of people. By looking at those results, scientists have learned how arteries change with age, how lifestyle and disease affect them, and how treatments can help keep them healthy. All of this is about one thing: making sure your heart and arteries are not aging faster on the inside than you are on the outside.
Can you talk about the need to continue to fund research and investment in health tech?
Our modern lives are built on research that taxpayers funded first. The internet. GPS. MRI. None of these began as venture products. Government backed the long, uncertain years. Industry later turned them into everyday tools. That is the playbook that works.
In cardiovascular sensing, it is the same story. Signal processing, materials, low-noise electronics, clinical trial methods, biostatistics. Decades of support from NIH, NSF, DARPA, and public universities made that toolkit possible. My teams move faster and take smarter risks because that groundwork exists.
If we shrink that base, we slow the whole pipeline. Fewer bold ideas leave the lab. Translation to everyday settings takes longer. Startups pick incremental projects. Investors avoid the hard science. The United States cedes standards and core IP to countries that invest consistently. Talent goes where the science is funded and the path to market is clear. That is brain drain, and it is hard to reverse.
How can we improve it? Keep research budgets stable in real terms. Speed up and simplify grants so time goes to discovery, not paperwork. Expand non-dilutive programs like SBIR and STTR. Fund translational centers that pair academic labs with clinics and industry. Invest in regulatory science and modern trial infrastructure so evidence is faster and cheaper to produce. Use public procurement and pilots to pull first deployments into health systems. Align reimbursement with prevention and early detection, not only late-stage care.
This is not about subsidizing one company. It is about keeping the United States a place where the best people want to work on the hardest problems, and where their work turns into products that improve lives. That is the competitiveness that matters.
Are you worried about the state of women in engineering? In the US, women make up 10% of all electrical engineers, although the percentage is higher in other disciplines.
Representation for women in engineering has improved in some areas, yet too often the pathways to leadership remain unclear and support systems inconsistent. It is not enough to get women into the field. It is about helping them build careers they want to stay in and that value their contributions.
Engineering is not purely technical. The most effective engineers also know how to manage people, balance business priorities, and communicate with decision-makers. Those skills are learned, and they develop faster when you take on roles that stretch you beyond your comfort zone. That can mean leading a cross-functional team, taking ownership of budgets, or representing your work to executives or customers.
Research shows that women tend to hold back from applying unless they feel fully qualified. A Harvard Business Review survey found men apply when they meet about 60 percent of listed requirements, while women wait until they meet them all. Yet when women do apply, the data shows they are often as competitive or more competitive than men. In one large academic hiring study in STEM fields, equally qualified women were preferred over men by a two-to-one margin. That tells me the hesitation to step forward costs opportunity.
What needs to change is twofold. Women need to actively seek out high-visibility, high-responsibility assignments, even if success is not guaranteed. Organizations need to make sure those opportunities are accessible, that risk-taking is supported, and that both technical and leadership contributions are recognized. When both sides move, more women will not just enter engineering, they will lead in it.
What's your key advice to an engineering student?
See the whole problem, not just your piece of it. Engineering is as much about managing trade-offs and working across disciplines as it is about the technical design. The saying “good, fast, cheap — pick two” applies to almost every project. Strong engineers know how to decide which two to focus on in the moment, while keeping a plan for how to improve the third.
Look for experiences that force you to balance competing priorities, whether that is performance versus cost, or speed versus quality. These situations teach you to make thoughtful decisions and explain them clearly to others.
Pursue opportunities that build both your technical skills and your understanding of the bigger picture. Practice presenting your work to people outside your specialty. Learn how budgets are set and how success is measured. The engineers who grow the fastest are the ones who connect what they are building to why it matters, and can adapt when priorities change.
Editor's Note: Sensors Converge 2026 runs May 5-7, 2026, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California. The deadline for speaker submissions is Sept. 19.