Conference: ElevateHER: Engineering Innovations for Women's Health Discovery

The ElevateHER conference (Engineering Innovations in Women’s Health Discovery) aims to bring together a confluence of biomedical engineers and scientists to collectively identify challenges and opportunities in women’s health engineering. These will be identified by keynote talks, moderated panel discussions, poster sessions, and guided discussions amongst all participants. Women’s health is broadly defined as all biological processes that disproportionately impact women across their lifespan. The conference aims to identify how engineering tools can be applied to improve fundamental knowledge of women's health. By bringing together experts and conducting focused discussions, this conference will identify creative new ways that engineering technologies can be used to research women’s health. The findings from the conference will be organized into a peer-reviewed manuscript that will increase the number of scientists and engineers that engage in women’s health engineering research. Two driving questions for the ElevateHER (Engineering Innovations in Women’s Health Discovery) conference are: (1) How are engineering technologies used to currently drive innovations in women’s health discovery? (2) What opportunities lie within engineering tools to address fundamental knowledge gaps in women’s health? Using these guiding questions, the theme of women’s health, defined broadly as all conditions that disproportionately impact women across their lifespan, will be addressed. How engineering tools in the following core categories are applied currently to women’s health engineering will be explored and identified: (1) Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering; (2) Biomechanics and Mechanobiology; (3) Devices, Sensors and Photonics; (4) Immuno-engineering. By convening a diverse group of biomedical engineers and scientists, the conference aims to leverage biomedical technologies' transformative potential to make fundamental discoveries in women's health. Success for the conference will be achieved by identifying and highlighting engineering tools not commonly used in the context of women’s health, thereby catalyzing new collaborative and exploratory pathways within women’s health engineering. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.