pressure. contraction. favorite. rupture. For many people, these words refer to the experience of childbirth. For Michelle Owen, something else comes to mind.
“These are all engineering terms that obviously relate to physical forces,” says Owen, an associate professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering. “We've always treated women's health as just a biological problem, but it's also an area of engineering and physics.”
As director of WashU's Center for Women's Health Engineering, Owen strives to bring physicians and engineers together to improve women's health care. While such collaborations have long proven successful in fields such as orthopedics, technological advances in women's health have been slow, contributing to some alarming statistics. There is. For example, in the United States, one in every ten babies is born prematurely. And maternal mortality rates are increasing, especially among women of color.
“There is a false idea in people's minds that they don't need to know more about pregnancy. Of course, women who have had a miscarriage or stillbirth, or who have been induced early due to pre-eclampsia. would not agree,” Owen said. “We don't really talk about how little we understand all of this.”
“I'm not personally going to solve all maternal health problems. I'm part of the generation that will move the next generation forward toward solutions.”
Michelle Oyen, Director of the WashU Women's Health Engineering Center
Owen points to several root causes of the problem. Medical experiments are usually not performed during pregnancy for good reason. Animal models also do not provide much useful information. And for decades, biomedical research has been designed, conducted, and funded exclusively by men. This historic lack of gender diversity may also hinder research into diseases that disproportionately affect women, such as autoimmune diseases and a variety of diseases that lead to hundreds of thousands of women having hysterectomies each year. there is.
The Center for Women's Health Engineering is already making progress toward overcoming these challenges. In one of her ongoing projects, Owen and Anthony Odibo, Virginia S. Lang Endowed Chair in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Virginia S. Lang School of Medicine, and Ulugbek Kamilov, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the McKelvey School We are also conducting research on the placenta. Researchers will use machine learning and advanced imaging techniques to create computational models of placental function. Such models provide insight into placental problems that occur early in pregnancy and can cause long-term cardiovascular problems for both pregnant women and newborns.
“Everyone is born with a placenta,” Owen says. “I think this is something that's not appreciated within the larger framework of women's health. We're talking about things that affect all of humanity.”
Students, especially women training to become doctors or engineers, are paying attention. Owen cites her education and training as key pillars of the center, along with her research and entrepreneurship.
“It’s great to see such enthusiastic young women wanting to use their engineering skills in this field,” Owen says. “I'm not personally going to solve all maternal health problems. I'm part of the generation that will move the next generation forward toward solutions.”
