Estelle Garcia, MTM

Estelle Garcia founded LivaFortis and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. She also reviews the research behind what we publish. Her training started in mechanics, not medicine.

Estelle spent three years in mechanical and industrial engineering through a French double diplôme — a single course of study split between Arts et Métiers in France and the University of Bristol in the UK, finishing first in her cohort at Bristol. Engineering of that kind is the study of load, force, and structure under stress, which is also a fair description of what a spine does every day. She carried it into R&D work on spinal implants and surgical instruments at Zimmer Biomet, and later into device development at UCSF's Helen Diller Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The bridge between engineering and health was a Master of Translational Medicine, the joint UC Berkeley–UCSF program built around one question: how does a finding in a journal become something that actually helps a person?

That question is the reviewer's job here, too. Most back pain content online fails not because the underlying studies are bad, but because someone read a small trial and wrote a confident headline the data couldn't hold up. That gap — between what a study found and what an article says it found — is what Estelle checks for.