Karen Cross: A Healing Path Lit by Persistence and Purpose

In grade two, Karen Cross stood up in her classroom on Halloween and announced she was a doctor. Her teacher replied, “Little girls can’t be doctors.” Quiet and introverted, Karen shocked even herself when she defiantly responded, “I have a prescription pad in my bag and I’m going to be a doctor.” That moment didn’t just reveal her future—it forged it.

Karen’s journey would take her from rural Newfoundland to the operating rooms and research labs of Toronto, and finally back to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Along the way, she would earn not just an MD, but a PhD—becoming what colleagues dubbed the “double doctor.” But her purpose was never about accolades.

“I just want to make the world a better place,” she said. “I want to bring more equity to the world, but I want to do it in a way where I’m healing people.”

Karen’s idea of healing went far beyond surgery. As a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, she became known for asking her patients not just how their wounds were healing, but how their lives were. “There was one woman with a foot wound,” she recalled. “I realized this person's heart is broken. It's not about the diabetes. We needed to be tender with that first.”

Her practice in downtown Toronto, especially at St. Michael’s Hospital, exposed her to a recurring problem: the tools and technology available were designed with only one kind of patient in mind. “What I had just wasn't available for the global majority,” she said. That realization deepened when her own grandfather developed a diabetic foot wound, and she watched firsthand how the system failed him—and so many others like him.

With that personal and professional clarity, she made a leap many thought was unthinkable: Karen left her academic surgical career to build a startup.

Together with her co-founder General, a brilliant yet humble engineer, they built Mimosa Diagnostics. The handheld device they created uses multispectral imaging and thermal sensing to detect wounds and perfusion problems under the skin—well before they’re visible to the eye.

“We went from seven computers and three days to process one image, to something that fits in your pocket,” Karen said. “We’re helping people in ways we never could before.”

Leaving behind the world she trained for her whole life wasn’t easy. “People thought I was off my head,” she laughed. “But we helped 1,000 people last week. I could barely see 100 as a surgeon.” Mimosa is now commercial in the U.S., and Karen is pushing hard to bring the same innovation home to Canada, urging policymakers and hospitals to support local technology with global impact.

Perhaps the most powerful moment came when nurses and doctors using Mimosa started calling it “the Mimosa Movement.”

“They told me, ‘This is a company that will change the system, and we want to help you do it.’ That was the most humbling thing,” Karen said. “It’s a pay-it-forward moment. And it’s working.”