New Report Highlights Engineering’s Role in Closing the Women’s Health Gap

Engineering Research Visioning Alliance report identifies priorities for overcoming historic research barriers and improving women’s health outcomes

DEC. 11, 2025 – A new report from the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA), funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), explores the potential for engineering research to address critical gaps in women’s health—an area historically underfunded and under-researched despite impacting more than half the population.

Women disproportionately suffer from a range of health conditions — including gynecological, cardiovascular, neurological, musculoskeletal, mental health, immunological conditions and infectious disease. Yet, progress in understanding and treating these conditions has been hindered by research barriers such as biological complexity, ethical constraints and exclusions in clinical trials. The ERVA report, Transforming Women’s Health Outcomes through Engineering, underscores the potential of engineering to overcome these seemingly intractable women’s health challenges. The report puts actionable research directions into focus, building on a recent McKinsey analysis which found that advancing new engineering technologies to market and the clinic to tackle major challenges could generate up to $1 trillion in societal benefits by 2040.

“Engineering approaches have long been used in medicine to address conditions that are otherwise challenging to study,” said Michelle Oyen, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Wayne State University, who co-chaired the ERVA visioning event that laid the groundwork for the report. “Critical gaps in women’s health remain, but are amenable to interdisciplinary intervention, including engineering.  Our report outlines a vision for applying engineering research to overcome historical research barriers and tackle these pressing challenges, to bring women’s health level with other areas of medicine.”

The ERVA visioning event brought together experts from engineering, clinical medicine, technology enterprise and startups to identify research directions that could transform women’s health outcomes through engineering and unleash the vast potential to improve women’s lives and health. The resulting report highlights four key opportunities, considering a broad umbrella of women’s health from in utero through post-menopause. They include:

1. Data, artificial intelligence (AI), and medical imaging technologies, including new data transport and mobile phone-based technologies to improve accuracy and enhance privacy and security;
2. Computational models, including digital twins and novel biophysics and analysis models that can be tailored to women’s physiology;
3. In vitro models, including digital tissue twins using a patient’s own cell and engineered microphysiological systems to improve diagnosis and prevention; and
4. Patient-facing medical devices, including sensors sensitive to subtle physiological changes, personalized therapies, novel materials and biofabrication techniques, and new drug delivery mechanisms.

Although engineering research priorities were the focus, three cross-cutting threads emerged as critical to advancing these directions:

1. Addressing challenges in women’s health across the lifespan,
2. Engineering women’s health data, ethics, privacy, and security, and
3. Re-imagining approaches to women’s health engineering research funding and collaboration (such as consortia-based mechanisms, dedicated research institutes, and new education and training programs for women’s health and engineering).

“We are optimistic about the potential for engineering-driven breakthroughs in women’s health, but success hinges on cross-disciplinary collaboration,” said Dorota Grejner-Brzezinska, ERVA principal investigator and vice chancellor for research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Our hope is to inspire researchers and funding bodies to take action on these priorities and fuel the innovations that can meaningfully enhance women’s daily lives and contributions to society.”

Transforming Women’s Health Outcomes Through Engineering is the eleventh report released by ERVA, an initiative funded by the NSF to help identify future engineering research directions. The executive summary and full report can be downloaded from ERVA’s website here. Visit ERVA’s website to see other reports generated by visioning events: Strategic Engineering for Next-Generation Wireless Competitiveness, Engineering Opportunities to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance, AI Engineering | A Strategic Research Framework to Benefit Society, Engineering Materials for a Sustainable Future, Engineering the Future of Distributed Manufacturing, Engineered Systems for Water Security, Sustainable Transportation Networks Engineering,  R&D Solutions for Unhackable Infrastructure, Leveraging Biology to Power Engineering Impact, and The Role of Engineering to Address Climate Change.

ERVA is funded by the National Science Foundation.

About The Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA):

The Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA) is a neutral convener that helps define future engineering research directions. Funded by the NSF Directorate for Engineering, ERVA is an engaged partnership that enables an array of voices to impact national research priorities. The five-year initiative convenes, catalyzes and enables the engineering community to identify nascent opportunities and priorities for engineering-led innovative, high-impact, cross-domain research that addresses national, global and societal needs. Learn more at ERVAcommunity.org.