Office Hours: Episode 11

Episode Extras

• Learn More About Dr. Erika Moore

  Dr. Erika Moore is an Assistant Professor within the Fischell Department of Bioengineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2013 and her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University in 2018.

  As the Principal Investigator of the Moore Lab, Dr. Moore is dedicated to engineering biomaterial models that harness the regenerative potential of macrophage immune cells in tissue repair and regeneration. Her research centers on health inequities, including age-associated macrophage dysfunction, macrophage–endothelial inflammation mediation in lupus, macrophage integrin–ligand interactions within the extracellular matrix, and the role of macrophages in propagating uterine fibroids.

  In addition to her scientific endeavors, Dr. Moore is a strong advocate for professional development and financial literacy. She founded Moore Wealth Inc., a nonprofit organization focused on empowering students with financial literacy and career-readiness skills.

  Dr. Moore’s work has been recognized with numerous honors and awards, including the NIH R35 Maximizing Investigators Research Award, NSF CAREER Award, 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, and selection as a 2020 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Healthcare and a 2024 TED Fellow. More recently, she was named a 2025 Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine by the National Academy of Medicine, a 2025 Science News Scientist to Watch, an invited participant in the National Academy of Engineering’s 2025 Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, and a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Forum on Regenerative Medicine. In 2026, she received the BMES–Cell and Molecular Bioengineering (CMBE) Rising Star Junior Faculty Award.

  Links to Dr. Moore' Work

  • Moore Lab

  • Cell Line-Specific Estrogen Responses Uncover Functional Sex Differences in Murine Macrophages

  • TRACE: Applying AI Language Models to Extract Ancestry Information From Curated Biomedical Literature

  • Modeling Uterine Fibroids Using Bioengineered Hydrogels

• Learn More About Dr. Shreya Raghavan

  Dr. Shreya Raghavan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University, where she leads a research program at the intersection of biomaterials and mechanobiology. Established in 2020, the Raghavan lab at Texas A&M uses a reverse-engineering approach to reveal how the mechanical and material environment of our tissues influence health and disease. Key open-source inventions from the Raghavan lab drive impactful scientific discoveries in cancer and women’s health. Her research is supported by the NIH R37 MERIT Award, NSF, DOD and the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. Her creative and impactful contributions have been recognized with the BMES Rita Schaffer Young Investigator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and the BMES-CMBE Young Innovator and Rising Star awards.

  Beyond the bench, Dr. Raghavan is an advocate for the biomedical engineering community fostering a scientific future that benefits all humanity. This commitment extends to her mentorship, where she trains the next generation of engineers to build and communicate a scientific landscape that is accessible to society. Through various roles within the Society for Biomaterials and the Biomedical Engineering Society, Dr. Raghavan is a nationally recognized leader in promoting women’s health research as an area of critical scientific inquiry and policy advocacy.

  Links to Dr. Raghavan's Work

  • ElevateHER: Engineering a New era in Women's Health

• Read the Transcript

  Liz Wayne

  Hi everyone! Welcome to Office Hours with Liz Wayne, a podcast brought to you by the Biomedical Engineering Society. I'm Liz, an assistant professor in bioengineering. I'm going to introduce you to the world of biomedical engineering through my eyes or my voice. From genes to machines, biomedical engineers can do it all. We'll dive into how discoveries are made, how research becomes medicine, and what it's actually like working in academia today. So, whether you're a student, researcher, educator, or just someone who's curious about science and how the academic world works, you've come to the right place.

  This is another episode of Office Hours with Liz Wayne. I am, as you may have guessed, Liz Wayne, Assistant Professor at University of Washington in bioengineering, and we're going to break down a couple of things that we've been talking about in class, or in life, or on Instagram, or, you know, in the group chat. And today we have a special topic with some very special people. We're going to talk about women's health and how it's changed, how it hasn't changed, and what we can do about that, so many times we think about women's health, and it's often in the context of, wow, we actually haven't thought about that, or what, no one's actually studied that? How come we don't know how pregnancy works, or how the uterus works, how the uterus can grow things when you didn't ask it to grow anything at all? There's just so much intrigue and things to think about, and when we think about why we don't know about these things, it's because it's been historically underfunded, maybe underrepresented, but that is actually started to shift in the most recent, I would say, decade, maybe, as more, I would say more women have been joining the collegial academic field, being able to ask those kinds of questions, and research funding has come around, and I don't know a lot about it, because while I am a woman, I'm really interested in people who know more about this and are trying to lead that future, so I actually thought I'd bring in some experts who could have a bigger conversation about this, and there's really no better group of people to do this with this tag team group, this amazing duo, Dr. Erika Moore and Dr. Shreya Raghavan. Thank you so much. I need, like, a podcast, like horn or siren! So yes, they are both professors in bioengineering, and they have not only been coming to, in their own terms, and on their own footing, thinking about women's health and how it applies to biomaterials, but they've also been working together, so welcome to the show. How are you guys doing today?

  Shreya Raghavan

  Good, thank you for joining us.

  Erika Moore

  Yeah, we're delighted to be here. A big topic to discuss,

  Liz

  So, for people who may not know of you and your work, tell us about yourselves. Shreya, would you like to start?

  Shreya

  Okay, so more about me and my work. So, I'm an associate professor at Texas A&M, and I started my lab in 2020 which was, you know, an interesting time to start a lab. We started working on cancer mechanobiology and sort of looking at mechanobiology from two sides of that coin, so understanding what the consequence of mechanics were on cancer, and then on other tissues, like the gut, the uterus, and then the other side of that coin was how do structures in the body produce those mechanics. So, how does the gut produce the mechanics of peristalsis? How does the uterus produce the mechanics of peristalsis? So, we look at both sides of the mechanobiology point, and so we've sort of, you know, we worked our way through cancer a little bit, and colorectal cancer, and then we're working our way through sort of the uterus now, and the myometrium and endometrial cancer.

  Liz

  Okay, so we're going to get back to that, because I'm so dumb. My first thought when you said that is like, how's my uterus connected to my colon, and I think that I really want to know. What about you, Erika?

  Erika

  Yeah, so I am an assistant professor at the University of Maryland College Park, and my lab focuses on using biomaterial tools to understand and investigate fundamental cellular physiology and cellular processing, so mainly we do this looking at myeloid cell function, monocytes, and macrophages, their involvement and interactions with other cells in the body in different disease contexts. So, we study them in the context of uterine fibroids. We also study them in the context of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus [SLE] and looking at vascular interactions. We also look at aging and different identity markers, so you can even think ethnicity, sex, ancestry, and age and how all of that influences cellular physiology in our biomaterial model systems, so we have our a lot of hands in many pockets, but it's all guided by the use of these tools to ask these fundamental questions.

  Liz

  I like this because you're both highlighting that you found ways to think about problems that have been under studied or maybe making connections that weren't, you know, kind of there before. And so, thank you for giving me a brief explanation of your research. And I'm kind of curious what you think about the trajectory of women's health, and as people who have been working in women's health, what has that experience been like for you?

  Erika

  That's fine. I have a hot take, and I'm going to share it, and this is why I wanted - I wanted Shreya to go first, but I'm going to share my hot take. My hot take for women's health is that women's health has always been present, but it just has not been defined or like characterized in the way that we need it to be in order to make inroads in certain diseases, and so I'm going to start with this hot take by saying, you know, there's a lot of interest right now in women's health, and I love that, and there are a lot of trainees coming and kind of being like, I want to do women's health, I want to do women's health, and I'm like, that is awesome, come on in, join the BMES SIG, connect with these other titans in the field who are leading these efforts and have been for years, but also get really crystal clear on what specifically you want to be involved in. When you use the term women's health, it covers everything, you know, so the NIH does a really beautiful job of characterizing women's health. There are kind of, they have four benchmarks or definitions that they use, but basically, these definitions help us show that there are diseases that are disproportionately impacting women, there are diseases that present differently in women, there are diseases that only affect women. So, if you look at those definitions, any disease that you study could technically be classified as women's health, right? So that's my hot take. Like, get very clear on how we define and articulate women's health as a field, when we talk about our contribution to women's health, are we just thinking reproductive and maternal health? That's another hot take, but I won't touch it. Are we thinking other elements or realms of the lived experience of women as they go throughout their health journey and lifespan? Right, because we all have bones, do we think about women's health in the context of osteoporosis, or, you know, bone decay and other things like that. So, I think that's the foundation that I'll start with.

  Liz

  I want to first of all give you your claps here, your little snaps here, but I think that's a really good way to actually start a conversation about women's health, which is to, first of all, maybe even debunk this kind of women's health is always underfunded, it's understudied, it's under. Because it actually kind of reinforces this deficit mentality, this idea that we need to focus on a topic or a group of people because they need us so badly, because they're just so helpless, I think there's like an official term for that, and I think there's like the deficit structure people often think about that in terms of, for instance, education. Oh, we need to help the URMs, we have to give them more and more support, because they just need that more and more support, instead of actually saying they have a deficit, saying that no, they just need the same services or the same exposure that everyone else is getting, and we're not actually helping them because they're below or beneath, or helping because that is actually just fair access, or like a really great question to ask. So, from this point on, too, in this conversation, I'm going to try to not use a deficit perspective when we think about women's health, because I think that's also helpful for all of us to frame, especially when people are moving into it and making sure they're going in for the right reasons.

  Erika

  Yeah, and I think that's really important, you know, caveat, because there are certainly elements of diseases or maladies that only affect women that have not been funded at all. That's a very true statement. But I also think we have to get very clear on what we want our delta to be, what we want, you know, from where we're at now to where we want to go, that's the delta, what we want that to be in terms of bioengineering contribution to this field, and so you know that's why I kind of made my earlier comment about getting, you know, yes, it's great to have interest in women's health, but what does it actually mean for the contribution that you intend to have, and why?

  Shreya

  And I think that's interesting, right? Both things can be true, I just appreciate that framing that it is underfunded, but it's not, you know, it doesn't have to be viewed with this deficit or damsel in distress lens.

  Liz

  But you know what I'm saying, right? You know, there's always this, you're getting a moral cape for pioneering women's health, when really what we're saying is, well, this is the population, or everyone has bones. Something that I like to think about when you know the argument comes up, like why should you have like disparity studies, like disparity health, and you know for me that the real reason is that if you, if you say you want to cure cancer for all, and currently the people who are not surviving the cancer treatments are in a certain population, then that's why you study that population, right. So, it's not for the sake of just humanity, or you know, it's not some altruistic perspective. It really is a scientifically driven, and if you think about it, economic-driven, right? Because if they're going to the ER, if they are the ones that are making us have to have all these patient treatments, if a certain population gets treated, stage one, they're fine, but then these stage four people are getting worse disease, which is more money, and then more time off work, then that's your reason, right there, right? I don't care what population it is, but I'm really happy that you guys have these really rich perspectives, and it seems like a really great way to also talk about BMES as women's health SIG that has now started. Can you just talk about that a little bit, and your involvement in it?

  Shreya

  Sure. So we, I think the community has been coming together, coalescing around this notion, right, that women's health is broad, it is across the lifespan, it is anything that can disproportionately impact women. I think this field is sort of coalesced around this broad definition, and there's just more and more people that want to apply their bioengineering, biomedical engineering tools to solve some of these problems, right, whether that's in orthopedic health or athletic health or immunity, or whatever pain, and I think the community started seeing, especially within BMES, that there was more of these sex differences, accessible devices, all kinds of, you know, all these disparate things, and so I think the SIG was a good way to sort of bring everything together to coil us around that theme.

  Liz

  And when did it start again?

  Shreya

  Last year was the official- so last year was the official launch of the SIG.

  Liz

  Right. And then you know, I think this is important, because when we think about what do professional societies do, they are organizations of people who are doing the work, and it's a way for people to actually share knowledge across institutions, across career stages, across like types of institution, whether you're industry, clinical, or pharma, and to actually understand the direction of the field. And I think, as a student, I used to think these kinds of things just sounded too like- I don't know what that means. Why do you have a committee? This is kind of pointless, but people listen to these groups, so that directs where funding goes next. It can direct where students are going to apply, can direct what media sees as being really important, because now you've got an interest group that says this is the disease that we want to talk about. It really helps galvanize and center people. So in terms of activities, you know, I'm really excited to think about what you guys do next, but even the formation of the SIG is really exciting, so definitely hope that you guys check this out later on.

  Erika

  It is, and I'll just add a few notes, because you know the efforts we're sitting here talking on the pod in the pod, but I think to honor and acknowledge that there are so many people who have been pushing these efforts forward in the background for decades, you know, like so the SIG officially launched and led by Michelle Oyen, but I think it's also really important to just highlight, like Linda Griffith, and a lot of the other people who have been leading the rallying cry, and so they are continuing to galvanize and add other people to the conversation, like Shreya and I wouldn't be here talking to you without their efforts, and everybody else's efforts before us, and so I think that's really important, because even as we're talking about future steps and exciting things that are continuing to be planned, it's also really important to note that, like, there are all these little nucleation sites that are happening, like even in Boston. There are so many great things, I know. Juan Neco just led this really awesome women's health symposium this last spring, 2026, and so, I think there are a lot of little activities that are already getting started, and for people who are listening, if they want, they can join our Slack, because that's where we're really trying to bring everyone, trainees, every single person who's interested and wants to learn more about the efforts we're doing, and, like you said, Liz, that's the power of a society where you can have this programmatic broad reach, and then also set the standard moving forward.

  Liz

  I want to know about you've helped me really define what women's health is, and I'm curious when or how there's a civic moment or kind of when you were idea formatting that I want my lab to be associated with women's health, because it's a choice.

  Erika

  I think it is a choice, and I'll say for myself, I didn't start any of the projects in my group that focuses on women's health with the idea of studying women's health. I started focusing on diseases that I felt were disproportionately affecting the communities that I am a part of, and the communities of people that I love. And so that's how I got started in SLE, because SLE is a somewhat well-known autoimmune disease, but it disproportionately affects women, and then it also disproportionately affects women of color, and so that's where we really- that was the first grant that I ever got in my group focused on SLE and vasculitis and SLE, and so I would say intentionality in terms of women's health was not present, but intentionality in terms of impacting the communities that I loved and cared for was present and guided the research questions that we continue to ask, and then you know, even with fibroids, I have fibroids, I know so many women who have fibroids, and so it was just kind of like it was a somewhat obvious extension, but only obvious in the sense that now I have my professor hat on, I know how to write grants, I know how to recruit students, and I know how to try to get projects that I care about funded, and I think that's the beauty of having more women and more diversity in higher education, because then the questions that previously weren't asked can be asked.

  Shreya

  So I will say my, like, my entire training was sort of steeped in women's health, sort of the way we define it broadly, right? So, like graduate school, I trained in like how the gut moves and how it doesn't move, and how that incontinence is, you know, a terrible quality of life, and who does that affect? That affects women that have had multiple childbirths, and that have had forceps that have had, you know, obstetric trauma. And so, just coming from that lens, when I switched to my postdoctoral training, I worked on ovarian cancer, which was again, you know, the female specific cancer, and then when I started my lab, my interest really was in immunotherapy and outcomes immunotherapy, where women have suboptimal immunotherapy outcomes compared to men, and so that was my starting peaking interest when I was, you know, starting up my independent lab, but then when I had my second baby, I also had postpartum hemorrhage, and so then I was like, why am I not thinking about uterine mechanics? As I was bleeding out, my MFM [Maternal-Fetal Medicine] was like, maybe you should be thinking about this, you know, after you've stopped hemorrhaging, but that question stayed with me for a very long time, just being trained in the gut and thinking about how the gut moves, right? So that's the connection. When you say peristalsis, you know, and when I ask, when I give my talk, and I ask the room what organ or tissue most resonates with you when you hear peristalsis, everybody says the gut, nobody says the uterus, but the uterus is the other prevalent smooth muscle organ that has peristalsis that changes the direction of its mechanics on a 28 day cycle without changing its structure.

  Liz

  And also, what is peristalsis?

  Shreya

  So that's the cyclic deformation of, like, the gut, right, or the uterus, so it's like- it's how the smooth muscle sort of deforms and contracts.

  Liz

  So, peristalsis is a nice, it's a movement, it is an important movement that happens, and the uterus also does that movement.

  Shreya

  Essentially, right. So it does, it changes its mechanics, multiple times over 28 day cycle, and then if those mechanics don't work well, it leads to preterm birth or postpartum hemorrhage, and so it really got me thinking about the mechanobiology of the uterus, and then that's how we, my lab, started making a more concerted effort, and looking at reproductive health and understanding the mechanics of the uterus. That's how we came into it.

  Liz

  Yeah, it's, you know, it's such a natural, like kind of underpinning and understanding. And I'm so happy both of you guys are doing this.

  [Music Break]

  As we were talking, I was also kind of thinking about what it means to say you do women's health, and somehow there's like a labeling that happens to people, even if you could do the same work, but then not say I'm in women's health, I'm just interested, and why some people like to label or not label, but I don't know if that's something you want to talk about now, if it's like ever happened.

  Erika

  One thing I was going to say was in response to that comment is trends happen, fads happen, and so I think that's why we're seeing this resurgence. Well, I would say surgence, because the first time of conversations around this labeling, and I think for better or for worse, you know, it's a trend, it's a fad. I would love for it to have longevity and have, you know, legs, that's just like part of the basic infrastructure, but one thing actually was really cool that was brought up, Sherry-Ann [Brown] and I got an NSF-sponsored grant to run our ElevateHer conference in 2024 and this was really fantastic, we brought together these groups of faculty from all over several disciplines within BME, but one comment that was said during that conference was it would be really great if we arrived at a place in time where we did not need to use the label women's health.

  Shreya

  Yes.

  Erika

  And that comment always stuck with me, because it's kind of like how I started with my hot take, if we actually are seeking to understand, you know, a disease. Yes, you know, if it only affects women, sure, we can use that label, women's health, but we could also just talk about the fact that, you know, 80% of women by the age of 50 will have uterine fibroids. That’s enough. That's enough of a number, right? That's enough of a calling to say, okay, yeah, this is something we should investigate, right? I think about people who study type one diabetes, they don't really always posit it as a pediatric disorder, but you know, that's usually when you start seeing presentation of symptoms and other things like that. So, I just share that to say that I think, while it's trending now, hopefully this wave can build people out to having it be immersive enough that it is no longer a trend, that it is just the default, it is just the standard of consideration. So that's kind of what I was going to say about the trend, the hot take.

  Shreya

  But that also solidifies, right? Like having a thing specific for it, solidifies sort of the intent and the sustainability. I remember hearing that comment, and I remember that you and I had very different first reactions to it. My first reaction to that comment was like, is this like all health is human health? Like, what are we, you know, after the conference, when the car ride back, because I was like, I'm not sure how to interpret this, but then I think our takeaway really at the end of it was this doesn't have to be, you know, a one size fits all approach, like that was, yeah, I remember having a very different reaction to that comment at first pass.

  Liz

  Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I mean, from parallel arguments, I can absolutely, absolutely see where that's going, and like, how I feel about that. Like, from a racial lens, sometimes I get very pissed when a well-meaning person says we need to protect our vulnerable people. I hate it, because they’ll also point at you, be like, she needs protection, and I'm like, that's not protecting me, because you called me out. I just want to be a part of what everyone else is doing. I was just walking and trying to live my normal PhD life, and you said something, usually Karen, you said something, and I was just like, everybody wants to be treated well, right? Like, this is just a normal grad student problem, not like a me specific because I'm black problem, right, but also there were times where I also did want to, like, no, no, no, there's something y'all don't get what I'm talking about, let me, I need this, so it is a really difficult conversation to have, and like different people who come to it, and then different generations of people, right? You know, I feel differently about certain things that I'm experiencing compared to maybe older women who really were the first only in their departments, versus now I'm not necessarily the only, sometimes I'm the only, but I just feel differently, and they get mad at me because I'm not responding the same way they did, but. But I'm interested in what you guys are doing now with your platforms as academic professors, like professional scientists now, who are helping shape what it means to be in women's health, and one of the ways that you did that is through ElevateHer. So, I was hoping we could actually pivot and talk a little bit about how it came to be that you guys even wrote the grant, and you know what happened with ElevateHer.

  Shreya

  Erika and I had had conversations about this before. So I was at a BMES SIG conference, I was at CMBE [Cellular and Molecular BioEngineering], and the then-program officer for NSF came up and said, "Hey, would you be- you probably know her as Stephanie George, she came up and she said she was a CBT program officer. She came up and she asked me, you know, she said, "Hey, every agency has to respond to this White House, you know. It was, it was a directive that every federal agency had to respond to increase their investments in women's health, and so you know it had the word health in it, right? So, NSF automatically is like, well, how do we respond to something? It has health in it. but Stephanie asked if I'd be willing to lead a workshop that brought together biomedical engineers, and at first I said no, and then she said, Are you sure? And I said, Well, I'll think about it. And then I came back, and I remember telling Erika about, I was like, Can we do this together, because I don't want to do this by myself, and she's shaking her head no, but she was way more enthusiastic than I was at that point.

  Liz

  [laughs] Of course she was.

  Shreya

  You know, the thing that we converged on at the very first moment when we decided we were going to do this is how broadly we were going to define women's health as something that was applicable- disproportionately impacting women up through ages and all identities, right? So it was a very broad definition, and so traditionally the thing we agreed on again was that there's - it's always been viewed as this monolith of reproductive health, it's been confused with reproductive health, maternal health, but really women's health is everything, right? It's autoimmunity, it's how we perceive pain, it's how it's why we get more migraines, and so we said we can do this if we can represent this broadly, and so we pitched it that way. We said, how can engineering tools be used for discovery in problems that are pertinent to women's health? And so, we were very intentional. We had a very open call, saying, you know, hey, do you want to come participate, help us sort of brainstorm what this engineering would be. I mean, could do, and again, you know, we were really building off of the momentum. So many think

  people had worked at Kristen Miller, Kristen Myers, Michelle Oyen, Linda Griffith - they all sort of pioneered aspects of women's health and engineering and just built on that and sort of capitalized on that momentum to bring more people together, and one of my favorite takeaways from ElevateHer was, you know, biomaterials, an academic that was sort of doing devices and biomaterials and was working on a urinary incontinence, right. He was like, well, you know, now I can, I understand that this framing is specific to women's health, and so it really brought people that were doing very what we consider hardcore biomedical engineering innovations towards, you know, applying their tools and thinking about different problems.

  Liz

  I love that, and it seemed like it had a really big impact. I wish I could have gone- it had a really big impact for people to really reframe how they had thought about women's health. Sometimes the reason why women aren't included in health is because they're thinking too narrowly about what it means to include women in health, so they don't even consider it, and that's not just, like, did you use male or female mice? Right? I think that's like the only thing people really think about, but it's like, no, no. What about the whole organism? What about the architecture and the structure and the movement? What about the stuff that you, as an engineer, actually know how to do? How are those things changing or different? So, it seems like you know, just off that, that was like really great for NSF to ask. They asked the right people to do this.

  Erika

  I will say it was a phenomenal experience, and something we hope to continue to do in the future. One thing I will add, though, one of our other major takeaways from the conference was, we had a few trainees who could attend, but due to budget reasons and size and scale of this first conference, we limited it to professors, and I think that if we did it again, planning for the future, and getting things ready, that's one beauty of the SIG. It's involving trainees, and I've had great conversations with trainees who are, you know, PhD, even undergrad and postdoc levels, and they have a really great idea on how to make- how to introduce standardization, how to craft science communication, how to, like, you know, any thought about it. They had such great commentaries around it, and so I think that's something that we would definitely adjust in the future, because we need more trainees being involved.

  Shreya

  I feel like our after-conference reflection both sort of converged on, you know, this notion of how are we building the future, right? Like, how do we expand this? Like, we both felt like that was a pretty big… not missed opportunity, but you know, at first pass that wasn't accommodated.

  Liz

  Okay, I think this is a really interesting point, because I've been thinking about, like, the training versus faculty balance as a professor. Now, I admit that there are times where I really enjoy having faculty-only spaces, because I get to be in a space where I'm actually just talking and ideating, and I'm not training someone to think about development of good questions, or, you know, the whole process. I'm not trying to make sure they're all up with me, and you get to kind of move faster in some sense. And then the other thing is, sometimes I think we make things that are trainee-only discussions that should be faculty, and for me it's, you know, science communication. I don't think you should drop the ball, I think professors should be doing science communication, and the problem, and the reason why some people don't know how to do it, is because they say that only trainees should do that, but then if half of them are going to leave the field, and it's like only three of you are ever going to become faculty, and you never do any science communication, that's actually a problem, because we're actually the experts, and they're the ones just like experimenting, but on the other hand, as you're saying, the trainees do bring new ideas, and they're the ones at the bench doing the work. I would even like to see some atmospheres where you know I want the trainee and faculty to go together as a pair, right? Because that's really where you get the best of both worlds. They got it, they got to go together. But anyway, I think it's really interesting how you make that choice. I probably would have done the same thing you did, though.

  Erika

  It was hard because this was also the first time it this kind of gathering was happening that was sponsored through NSF. There was also that same summer the NSF ERVA [Engineering Research Visioning Alliance] sponsor colloquium that was arranged and organized by Michelle Oyen, but I think that we wanted to focus on having a clear charge for the future that would have a multiplicative effect, and we thought strategically that would be easiest done. It was faculty first, that is not to say that's the only way it can be done, right, or the best path that could be done, but I think that trainees definitely need to be involved, but like you said, Liz, how, when, and where to effectively incorporate them is something we'll still have to play around with, and I'm really excited to see how the SIG continues to have that, you know, have them be interwoven and officers, hopefully even in that city.

  Liz

  Yeah, it's very exciting. Hopefully they hear you guys, and then sign up. How many people were at the conference?

  Shreya

  ElevateHer was close to 40, I think between 30 and 40.

  Liz

  That's a really good group, plus, and it's just like intimate enough to have some real good meetings.

  Shreya

  Yeah, the biggest comment we heard was that we put everybody to work over two days. Because they really were. I mean, you know, there was some amount of icebreakers in getting to know each other, but there was a lot of what ways can you identify within this field, or you know, what opportunities do you identify? And I think there was good brainstorming for about a day and a half.

  Liz

  Yeah, so I'm going to ask you some questions about what you think the current state of women's health is and what that means, right? We've talked about different definitions, but it seems like we've had some really good successes in women's health, and one is the exposure, but, like, scientifically it's actually asking questions around hormones, for example, or sex-based differences at multiscale levels. So, what do you guys see as some like successes in what this kind of framing and movement has done?

  Erika

  What's been really exciting to me is seeing the impact of the technological innovations and how those are starting to transform outside of academia.

  Liz

  Can you give an example?

  Erika

  There are like different apps becoming really common, like Natural Cycles and other things like that, where you see they're integrating with, like, Oura Ring, or you can even use your Apple Health to integrate on the phone and I think that that's really cool, because it's an example of using a biomedically engineered device, that's the Oura Ring, you know, and I love mine, but you can use it to kind of better understand your cycle and cycle variants and other things like that. Now that's a small example, but I do think it's revolutionary because it's FDA approved, or I don't want to misquote myself, but I believe that Natural Cycles is the first FDA-approved app for birth control. And it's like I'm going to double-check myself, but it's like-

  Liz

  What? I’m writing this down.

  Erika

  And I think that that's really cool, because those kind of things did not exist, like when I started puberty or anything like that. Yeah, so Natural Cycles is FDA cleared in the United States, that's the world's first birth control app, and I think that that is fantastic, because it's a way of having our data be integrated for larger scale purposes, and so I think that there is a lot of momentum within the VC space, within women's health space, for us to continue to push the technologies that we create using biomedical engineering right further beyond into translational impact, and so that's where I think the future is going to continue to move us.

  Liz

  And just to help people understand, you know, when we think about how is biomedical engineering involved in that. One, you know, is the software data, but then there's the design of the device, but then there's also the biology that went into understanding, I guess, how might temperature, or like sweat, or you know, changes in blood pressure, or these things over time actually relate information to ovulation, and so that's a whole bunch of other biology, you know, probably even animal work here, and patient data that went into something where now you don't have to do those experiments anymore, and you can rely on the data, but all of that is biomedical engineering, right?

  Erika

  Yeah, and I think it's really exciting because the whole premise, you know, the whole mission of the work we do under the umbrella of BMES is to transform human health, and so you can now download an app and your health is transformed, right, using your biomimetic markers and other things that come from these devices, and I know that there's going to be even more innovations, not just even in fundamental knowledge of understanding, like why uterine fibroids develop, but also hopefully for treatment of them that doesn't involve surgical intervention. So those are some of the things that I think we're moving towards impact. There's a crazy statistic, and I'm going to mess it up, but it's like the economic buying power of women for medical devices, and basically, like healthcare in the United States, it's really high. It's higher than it is for men, actually. So, like, even in family units, women are more likely to make the decision, you know, in terms of medicine, healthcare, and other things like that. And that's an economic leverage that now I think we're seeing a lot more businesses buy into, and that's leading to greater interest in therapies, therapeutics, FDA approval, and clearance for treatments that are going to make the lives of women better. And so, I think that's a full sandwich that's happening now, but it's like the economics are matching the kind of the technologies that are coming out, and we're seeing this big push for it.

  Liz

  That's a big sandwich. Shreya, what do you think?

  Shreya

  You know, I wasn't thinking about it from the wearable space. I was thinking about it more like we've seen BME in action, right, like with imaging and diagnostics, and like how we're doing better with dense breast tissue imaging and mammograms are predicting asymmetry diagnosis, like that's where my mind was going, because we've clearly seen like the precedent for BME impacting- BME technologies impacting women's health, but wearables is like very interesting, and even just how we do, you know, surgical instruments, cardiovascular health decisions we make now that we understand sex-based differences better at how those translate into the clinic. That's where my mind was going. Exciting, it's exciting times going forward. I think you know engineering just contributes to such powerful fundamental discovery that there's no place to go but up and forward.

  Liz

  I love that, and I think with you guys at the helm, you know, elevating her, and him, and to everyone, they're like shaking their heads at me right now, and I love it. I'm just going to keep praising them, so they can- I want to see if their head will fall off if they shake too fast, because they're like, no, no, not me, Liz.

  Shreya

  My back is like, so broken right now, my head will- hopefully it does not fall off.

  Liz

  Okay, oh, never mind, just JK, JK, but no, seriously, it's just really exciting. I'm like having chills, because I remember, you know, 2020, I remember you guys a little bit earlier on, and it's just really exciting to see you kind of in your form and just like taking shape.

  [Music Break]

  What do you think are the next steps for the SIG?

  Shreya

  Pointing to me again. I think the next steps for the SIG, and I don't want to speak for anybody else, but what I would hope to see is a conference that's dedicated to the SIG, that can grow, that you know, can bring people in different career stages together, and talk about this work, and talk about the future of this work, and talk about the sustainability of this work.

  Erika

  Yeah, I'll add, I think the future for the SIG is figuring out ways to effectively involve and leverage our trainees, because I don't know about, you know, other faculty members, faculty get tired. We're pulled in like 18,000 different directions every 20 minutes, and so sustained effort and impact takes a very concerted, you know, sacrifice and dedication. Not to say that it can't be done, it absolutely can be, but it's like many - there's a saying that says many hands make light work, and I know that there's a lot of excitement and a lot of hands in that analogy that want to come from trainees, so if we can get them involved, I know that our potential is kind of uncapped.

  Liz

  Right, and get them involved, and then retain them, because it really bothers me when we make things so much… it becomes busy work when we get them involved, but then we don't try to keep them in academia, because you lose that knowledge, but also you really were just using them to do stuff that you weren't doing, like, are you training them in, you know, really caring about what happens to them in the future, and allowing them to be able to stay in the academic atmosphere with the talents that they have.

  Erika

  That's a really great point. I feel like we could do a whole other podcast on brainy retention in academia.

  Liz

  Right? And you know, okay, so I was kind of pitching this thing for BMES, current conference climate funding situation, COVID, people think about travel, so I think there's like this really interesting watershed moment that's been happening, but it's like a cliff that we need to revolutionize what we think of societies doing for us, what conferences do, and the kind of experiences that we cultivate for people, and I think that if societies want to keep conferences going and they want you to choose your conference over the millions that biomedical engineering always chooses, because there's so many to choose from. I think we do have to innovate in that space to give people something more, and it's community.

  Erika

  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think gone are the days of taking for granted, oh, I'm just going to go to this conference to present, it's like, what are we offering, and training… training modalities or platforms are we bringing at all levels, right, because even for myself, I'm like weighing this conference versus that conference, and you know, part of it is, what professional development am I going to be exposed to in one versus the other.

  Liz

  We have to give people something besides being a discussion leader or a talk, and I think that the new frontier, that's, to me an exciting prospect, is to invest in experience and community,

  Shreya

  But I think every society is thinking about it, right, their value proposition, like what are they offering for value? I think that conversation, I mean, I think I'm glad to see that that conversation is happening, and it's an important conversation to have, especially at this time,

  Liz

  As we close, what are some final thoughts that you might have for our listeners?

  Erika

  Yeah, I would say that I really want trainees to feel empowered to get involved and to go to the SIG events to ask questions, to engage, to contribute, to suggest different things and implement them, because I think now more than ever, sometimes people are like, oh my god, the future of science. You know, it seems precarious, but I always liken this time as, you know, an earthquake. Like, during earthquakes, some of the most majestic elements in the world have been built, right? Like the Himalayas, Hawaii. Come on, now we appreciate these things, and we're like, oh my god, thank God I can go to Hawaii. Thank God, this volcanic eruption formed these islands, right? But I think that we often go too quickly to doomsday, like everything is so bad and horrible, but I think even as we've looked at this delta over the last two years, there is a lot of shifting, and there's a lot of ways that trainees can come in and be the new Hawaii, you know, the new Himalayas, the new elements of these programs and systems, and so I want to encourage people to feel empowered to do so, to get involved. My first time coming to BMES, I was like, what's BMES diversity about? I'm diverse, like I want to go, and I just kind of put myself in there, and that's created this lifelong, this career long relationship with BMES that, like, would not have happened if I wouldn't have interjected myself in the mix. So, feel free to interject yourself.

  Shreya

  Hard to follow up that metaphor at all, but you know what I will say is, I think the most exciting part for me, outside of, you know, being Hawaii in women's health engineering, is how much we don't know yet, right? And I think bring your curiosity, bring your energy, and bring creativity into it, because you need, like, we often say this, right? The problems that get solved, the questions that get asked, depends on who's asking, and, like, we need more people to ask those questions.

  Liz

  Couldn't agree more. I love this. You guys are a dream team, you know that. When we were thinking about this, I was like, "Oh, these are the people I want to bring on”. It was so exciting, but also, you know, Michelle Oyen was on this podcast already, giving an amazing, just amazing breakdown of mechanobiology with pregnancy. Dr. Ariella Shankonov gave a talk in the CMBE, and she gave an amazing, amazing talk about, like, her trajectory of women's health. Jenny Robinson was here talking about the role of hormones in women's health. I'm still trying to work with her to get tickets to the Seattle Storm, because she's working with them now. And this won't be the last time we talk about women's health, because as you have educated me, in my office hours, I came to office hours and I sat there and I asked questions, and I learned, and what you told me is that you could actually pigeonhole women's health, and you could say I'm going to do something specifically about women, but you could also have a broader perspective in saying that everything we do involves something related, something of women's health, and if you think about it, if I encourage you guys to use that broad perspective that you taught me how to use in women's health, you'd understand that actually every episode we have is women's health.

  Erika

  That’s true. Shout out to Jenny [Robinson], shout out to Michelle [Oyen]. Let me actually- start the music.

  Liz

  Turn her mic up! Let's just say we thank everyone, even people who helped me get here. People help you guys get here. I'm grateful to have two of Rita Schaffer Young Investigator Award winners on the call talking about how they are advancing women's health and all health for all of us. You have to get this pop culture reference, and maybe Erica will get it, but Shreya, you have to get it eventually. So, you know, like the Bad and Bougie, but somebody dubbed it to, like, Sid the Scientist.

  Erika

  I know it's so good.

  Liz

  That's how the gut moves!

  Shreya

  When this podcast is done, y'all can text me videos.

  Liz

  Can I be in the group chat? [laughs]

  Shreya

  We already have, like, you can already text me shady videos, those things that I don't understand.

  Erika

  But wait, Liz, do you use WhatsApp?

  Shreya

  I can use WhatsApp,

  Erika

  Because that's what you and I use.

  Liz

  This has been an episode of Office Hours Podcast with Liz Wayne and Dr. Erika Moore, Dr. Shreya Raghavan. Thank you guys so much. We will put links if you want to know how we're educating Shreya on her pop culture. We can also put those links in the bio of this podcast. You'll find out more about BMES Women's Health SIG. And yeah, we hope you guys have a really great day listening to all of this joy, because we're still here and we still love science.

  Erika

  Mixtape coming soon. [Laughs]

  Liz

  If you have questions or ideas for a future episode, feel free to email us at communications@bmes.org You can also stay up to date by following us on social media at BMES Society, and visiting our website at bmes.org/podcast/office hours. We look forward to hearing from you, and hopefully featuring one of you on the podcast.

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