Felipe Sahb Furtado

University of Michigan, Ross School of Business

“Physician-scientist turned healthcare consultant working to bridge the gap between medical innovation and patient access.”

Hometown: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Fun fact about yourself: I try to make any travel opportunity into a surf trip – I have surfed in more than 50 spots across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Undergraduate School and Degree: Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) – M.D.

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Amparo – Digital Healthcare Lead

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? McKinsey & Company – Detroit, MI

Where will you be working after graduation? McKinsey & Company – Associate

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

• Skip & Carrie Gordon Scholarship
• Ira Harris Merit Award
• Dean’s List (Top 10% of the class): Fall 2024, Winter 2025
• Beta Gamma Sigma International Business Honor Society (Top 20% of MBA students)
• Venture Fellow, Michigan Biomedical Venture Fund
• Applebaum Impact Design Fellow, Business+Impact
• Research Associate, Center for Entrepreneurship
• VP of Education and Professional Development, Healthcare & Life Sciences Club
• Associate Vice President of Prospective Students, Brazilian Business Student Association (BRASA)
• Co-Lead, Student Ambassador Committee
• Student Ambassador, Business+Impact
• Peer Coach, Consulting: Strategy / Healthcare
• Director of Partnerships, Nucleate Michigan

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school?

My favorite co-curricular experience at Ross was being part of the Impact Studio, the early-stage incubator for startups focused on social impact. It was a cradle of multidisciplinary innovation that inspired me and brought me a sense of community beyond my MBA cohort.

I joined the Studio in my first year as an Applebaum Impact Design Fellow and mentored founders trying to solve problems ranging from health insurance pricing to managing CO₂ levels inside homes. The Studio supported founders by providing coaching, bringing in experienced guest speakers, and connecting them to non-dilutive funding sources. Multiple students were able to secure tens of thousands of dollars to scale without giving away any equity, which is especially important in impact-focused ventures because it allows mission-driven goals to remain the top priority. It was impactful and inspiring to witness how these ideas were brought to life and turned into real businesses, several of which the students continued to work on full-time after graduation.

One of the most impressive success stories was The SunBundle, which leveraged the University of Michigan’s unique sports leadership to scale the reconditioning and donation of college sports equipment, improving access to underserved student-athletes. To date, they have raised more than $100,000, and the co-founders, Clare McNamara and Yasmine Mansi, are working to expand partnerships across the country.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? I trained as a physician-scientist, and I am proud to still have this as part of my identity. The scholarly work I conducted as a Research Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School established a lasting foundation for my career; I am fortunate to still be engaged with collaborators to stay connected to this side.

One of the research projects that I felt most passionate about was establishing faster and more accurate protocols for noninvasive cancer imaging. While it was rewarding to provide a pathway for patients to have earlier and better diagnoses, I realized that the success of this endeavor was constrained by the ability to commercialize such medical innovations. This realization was the final push that made me pursue business roles, but I have not left my scientific roots behind. I remain involved in the academic community by serving as a peer reviewer and associate editor for the Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and continuing to publish with my former Harvard and Mass General colleagues. My hope is that this impact will keep propagating and reaching patients worldwide, translating to the best care science has to offer.

Why did you choose this business school? My relationship with Ross began well before applying, sparked by a warm introduction to the community from alumnus Mauro Suman Neto. This initial sense of belonging was reinforced immediately after my admission, when members of the Brazilian Business Student Association (BRASA) reached out to guide my decision-making process. While the school’s curricular flexibility, hands-on learning, and career outcomes were all compelling reasons, I ultimately chose Ross for its community. As an international student, I wanted these two years to be more than an academic exercise. I wanted to be in an environment where I could forge genuine, lasting relationships.

Ross maintains a remarkable culture that balances high performance with a grounded, collaborative attitude. It never feels like a zero-sum game. Whether celebrating a touchdown at the Big House or collaborating on a case study in the Winter Garden, there is a palpable sense that every win is shared and that we are all playing for the same team. This is particularly evident during the recruiting season, when classmates consistently share job postings and support one another rather than competing. I saw this mindset in action recently when I connected a classmate looking for an internship with a friend who was launching a startup. By facilitating that introduction and helping leverage university sponsorship for the role, I was able to turn two individual needs into a shared opportunity.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? My favorite MBA professor was Professor Eric Schwartz, who is an Associate Professor of Marketing. Coming from medicine, I mistakenly viewed marketing as just the creative art of advertising, completely unaware of the broader commercial strategy it entails, especially the precise, quantitative science behind it. This became evident when I took Professor Schwartz’s elective Customer Analytics, where students are challenged to extract insights from large real-world datasets and recommend executive decisions such as which customer segments to prioritize or how to set a target customer acquisition cost given an expected customer’s lifetime value. It was by far the most challenging course I have taken at Ross, and somewhat because of that, one of the most rewarding ones.

Professor Schwartz strikes the perfect balance between demanding academic rigor and providing a supportive environment. He pushed us harder than anyone else, but his approachable nature through the struggle earned my absolute admiration. Even more inspiring is his work outside the classroom. As an entrepreneur and co-founder of BlueConduit, he actively deploys the same machine learning models we study to solve real public health infrastructure issues, specifically locating hazardous lead pipes without digging for them. It is this rare mastery of theory and practice that makes him such an aspirational role model, and my favorite professor.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? My favorite course was Health Care Markets and Public Policies. As an MBA student, it is easy to over-index on business aspects and gloss over public policy, but in certain fields like healthcare, these two are inextricably intertwined. Taught by Professor Sarah Miller, the course was a phenomenal deconstruction of the United States healthcare market. Each lecture, important questions that you see every day on the news were dissected and exposed: Why do Americans pay so much for healthcare? Why do outcomes lag behind other developed countries despite so much expenditure? The brilliance of the class was that it didn’t offer neat, off-the-shelf solutions–because in healthcare policy, those rarely exist. Instead, the real value came from the classroom debates these questions sparked. Learning to grapple with that systemic ambiguity, and realizing that asking the right questions is often more important than finding easy answers, is exactly what prepares us to be better healthcare leaders. I will apply this nuanced perspective directly to my consulting work in the healthcare and life sciences space.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? My favorite MBA tradition was the BRASA Barbecue, hosted by the Brazilian Business Student Association. Every fall, we gather more than 300 people at Burns Park for a cookout featuring Brazilian staples like picanha and farofa. There is something really special about bringing people from diverse backgrounds together around food and sharing our culture with them. It was not an easy feat to cook all day for that many people, but it was sure worth it when we saw their smiles and appreciation for our food. The massive turnout for this event beautifully reflects our school’s DNA–an incredibly diverse student body that is genuinely eager to embrace and celebrate global cultures.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? After hosting many ‘Ask Me Anything’ sessions for prospective students, answering this question became second nature to me. “Worry less and trust the process,” I would say. Most people come to business school to achieve two objectives, which are difficult to reconcile with time constraints: to enjoy a world-class educational experience and, in the process, land a job. Given the realities of the job market and how competitive those positions are, it is easy to go all in on the latter. I was fortunate enough to find a positive balance and fit some social activities into the mix. To achieve this, it is necessary to trust the array of tools and resources the school gives us. At Ross, besides having great support from the Career Development Office, we are blessed with a community that favors cooperation over competition. Knowing from day one the strengths of the program and who you can count on gives the needed peace of mind and reassurance to secure offers and have fun at the same time.

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it?The most impactful case we discussed in class was Bausch & Lomb, during our core accounting course. It was so memorable because Professor Gregory Miller, one of the case’s authors, not only went through the key concepts, but vividly impersonated the figure of a manager whose aggressive accounting practices begin to challenge ethics, for example, by grossing up receivables and offloading merchandise to suppliers to hit sales targets. The whole experience highlighted how hard-set quotas can create perverse incentives. Even more, it reflected that accounting is much more nuanced than pure math. It was an eye-opening discussion that I will remember moving forward.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? I once struck up a casual conversation with two strangers downtown who promptly invited me to a barbecue the next day. I suddenly found myself eating and debating the sustainability of nuclear power with an environmental activist and a physics professor. That perfectly captures what I love most about Ann Arbor: it is a rare paradox of a cosmopolitan, fiercely intellectual hub wrapped in a welcoming, small-town package. It offers the perfect mix of city energy and suburban tranquility. I can start my day walking my dog through sprawling green spaces, and end it exploring an unexpectedly global food scene—from Yemeni coffee houses to Cuban burger joints—or soaking in the electric atmosphere of a game weekend.

What business leader do you admire most? I believe the highest mark of a true leader is the willingness to act in the interest of others. By that metric, I deeply admire Melinda French Gates. During my Global Health Innovation course, we studied the monumental scale of the Gates Foundation’s work in global public health and vaccination efforts. Seeing the staggering number of lives saved through these initiatives was eye-opening. Melinda French Gates has leveraged her platform, capital, and strategic mind to systematically dismantle global health inequities. For someone bridging the gap between medicine and business, her ability to scale life-saving solutions represents the exact standard of leadership I aspire to attain.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? I really liked when we had to use AI in an adversarial manner. For example, in our core Marketing course, we had an assignment where we would prompt the AI of our choice to analyze the positioning strategies of key players in a given industry. Then, we were instructed to critique the AI output and improve it. I enjoyed this process for two key reasons. First, it simulated real-world environments where we certainly would have AI tools at our disposal. Second, it encouraged students to both get better at extracting good answers from AI models and to be skeptical of their initial products.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? The classmate I admire the most is Armani Guerra, a U.S. Army veteran and former healthcare consultant whose life changed after developing long COVID. Faced with debilitating symptoms, uncertainty, and stigma, he chose not to withdraw but instead to build a platform to give him and others a voice. Armani founded the Infection Associated Chronic Conditions Case Competition at Michigan Ross, bringing together sponsors to raise more than $10,000, and involving patients, clinicians, and graduate students to design tangible solutions for communities affected by long COVID and related conditions. I had the privilege of competing in the inaugural event, where my team placed second, and was deeply moved by the honesty and support shared by patient speakers. His ability to carry his own illness, while relentlessly defending the interests of those who are vulnerable, and to translate suffering into motion and hope, is truly admirable.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list? The first item on my professional bucket list is to bring an academic lens to corporate healthcare strategy through published thought leadership. Having trained as a medical researcher, I know the importance of sharing evidence-based knowledge to drive a field forward. I want to continue this practice in the business world by contributing to authoritative, widely read insights, such as reports for the McKinsey Health Institute, that bridge clinical innovation and market dynamics. My goal is to provide healthcare leaders with grounded, well-researched frameworks to successfully scale the next generation of medical solutions.

The second item on my list is to return to Brazil to architect a university-backed healthcare venture fund and incubator at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. At Ross, my work with the Impact Studio and the Michigan Biomedical Venture Fund showed me the profound impact of having a structured ecosystem that supports early-stage, multidisciplinary innovation. While many Brazilian medical institutions possess incredible scientific talent, they usually lack a robust business infrastructure to turn research into scalable ventures. My long-term goal is to establish a pipeline that empowers the next generation of Brazilian physician-entrepreneurs, ensuring that local scientific breakthroughs can successfully reach the patients who need them most.

What made Felipe such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?

“Felipe translates his MBA training and his medical school background into profound, real-world impact on campus. He has worked with us to support the strategic vision of the Ross Impact Studio and serves as a dedicated mentor to numerous student founders. His presence and guidance elevate the entire U-M community, not just Ross.”

Moses Lee
Applebaum Innovator-in-Residence at Michigan Ross Impact Studio

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