Transforming Women's Health Outcomes through Engineering

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Exploratory Domains

The visioning event will identify and articulate strategic near- and long-term engineering research opportunities with the highest potential for positive societal impact.

The event will focus primarily on eight areas of intersection:

Stages of a woman's life

Prenatal to puberty
Reproductive years related to pregnancy
Reproductive years not related to pregnancy
Pre-, peri- and post-menopausal

Technology fields

AI/Imaging
Computer modeling
Diagnostic Technologies/Devices
and Tissue engineering/microfluidics.

This event will convene experts from across engineering, including those in research-based experimental methods (organoids and micro physiological systems), patient-focused novel devices (point-of-care diagnostics and wearables), computational models (digital twins and biological systems), and artificial intelligence (machine learning including medical imaging and natural language processing), to evaluate the landscape for novel applications across the range of women’s health conditions.

THEME OVERVIEW

Women’s health presents a multitude of biomedical challenges, incorporating both female sex- and gender-specific conditions and the many diseases and chronic disorders that affect women differently or disproportionately. Such conditions may be difficult to study using traditional research techniques: timescales associated with chronic diseases can be longer compared with typical laboratory experiments; mimicking complex human hormonal cycling and sexual development time course is challenging in cellular and animal experiments; human reproductive tissues are often unavailable for experimentation. Moreover, engineering offers the potential to mitigate sociocultural impacts on women’s health and broaden health equity.

At this event, participants will articulate critical areas where engineering research can impact women’s health across the full range of life stages. This impact is possible across the entire spectrum, from early mechanistic research into poorly understood conditions to patient-facing diagnostics, drugs, preventative strategies, and devices to ameliorate disease. The goal is to identify specific engineering research directions with the potential for the greatest return on investment that are nascent or require additional exploration.