G13 - Development of a Novel BME Course on Women's Health and Engineering

Introduction: : There has been growing interest in the field of women's health in the last three decades. This stems from recent recognition that diseases and conditions that affect women's health have been disproportionately under-funded by NIH (Mirin 2021, Burke 2025). It has been shown that women inventors are disproportionately the inventors on patents in women's health fields (Koning 2021), but that women inventors are significantly in the minority. Regardless, there has been fast growth in the "FemTech" space, with many start-up companies aimed at what McKinsey (with the World Economic Forum) has estimated to be a $1 trillion potential market (WEF 2024).

Within the field of women's health, a new sub-domain of biomedical engineering has emerged. While the number of women in engineering fields remains small and has been only slowly increasing since 1980, the number of papers published in "Women's Health Engineering" has rapidly grown since 2013 (Figure). With this backdrop, a new course on the topic of women's health and biomedical engineering was developed over the last two years, and taught at two different universities at the senior undergraduate or graduate level, and with some similar overall patterns.

Materials and

Methods: : A new semester-long course was run for the first time January-May, 2024 at Washington University in St. Louis and for the second time January-April 2025 at Wayne State University in Detroit. The course began with discussion of the field of women's health, focusing on diseases and conditions that affect only women, that affect women differently, and that affect women disproportionately. Focus was placed on areas of engineering that were particularly suited to innovation in the women's health space, e.g., in vitro tissue engineering and organoid models, microfluidics and microphysiological systems, mechanistic computational models, artificial intelligence and machine learning models, and a wide range of patient-facing devices for medical imaging, point-of-care diagnostics, physiological monitoring, and drug delivery. The course structure included many lectures on reproductive anatomy and physiology, sex differences and sex as a biological variable. Students did short case study presentations, where they chose a literature article that was on a clear application of engineering technology to a problem in women's health, on a reproductive or non-reproductive topic (or one each, the second time the course was run). The instructor screened the articles for topic; students performed peer review of the presentations. The course culminated with a final group project, again on a single application of engineering to women's health, and with each group member specializing in one aspect of the technology (e.g., materials, software, manufacturing, regulatory, ethics) depending on the topic. These specializations formed the basis for final individual written papers that supported the group presentation.

Results, Conclusions, and Discussions:: At both institutions, student engagement in the course was extremely high. Lecture attendance was above average, student questions both during and after lectures were common, and office hour visits were high, including many informal chats about career options in the women's health field. Students remarked on many occasions about transmitting information they learned in the class to students not in the course, friends, and family members. In both courses, a book (Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began by Leah Hazard, (2024) was required reading, and there were required and graded (complete/incomplete) discussion posts for reflections about each chapter of the book. The student feedback was positive about the reading requirement, which was surprising to the instructor given previous experience with reading assignments in engineering courses.

Student feedback was extremely positive, and well above departmental and school averages. Students particularly enjoyed guest lectures and Q&A sessions with external speakers, who included professors in reproductive science, FemTech start-up CEOs, and a midwife who has written books on women's health including the one mentioned in the previous paragraph (Hazard 2024). Many students related personal stories about mothers, aunts, cousins, and friends who had diseases and conditions discussed in the class, and for which there are not currently adequate diagnostic and treatment options.

The greatest challenge in teaching this topic was the lack of available resources with an engineering focus. Although the literature is growing, it is primarily in the form of journal papers, and there are not yet books in the field. It was very easy for the students and instructor both to get distracted by the physiology and medical content and for the instructor to have to drag the focus back towards engineering topics specifically.

The enthusiastic response and outstanding performance of students in the course was similar at both institutions, even though the primary research focus of the BME departments and overall university rankings differed between the locations. Women's health engineering as a topic provides an interesting strategy for recruitment of engineering students who were not previously aware that bioengineering could include the topics covered herein.

Acknowledgements and/or References (Optional):: [1] Arthur A. Mirin. Gender disparity in the funding of diseases by the u.s. national institutes of health. Journal of Women’s Health, 30(7):956–963, July 2021.
[2] Sheila P. Burke, Alina Salganicoff, and Amy Geller, editors. A New Vision for Women’s Health Research: Transformative Change at the National Institutes of Health. National Academies Press, February 2025.
[3] Rembrand Koning, Sampsa Samila, and John-Paul Ferguson. Who do we invent for? patents by women focus more on women’s health, but few women get to invent. Science, 372(6548):1345–1348, June 2021.
[4] Ellingrud K, P ́erez L, Petersen A, and Sartori V. Closing the women’s health gap: A one trillion dollar opportunity to improve lives and economies. https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/closing-the-womens-health-gap-a-1-trillion-dollar-opportunity-to-improve-lives-and-economies, January 2024.
[5] Leah Hazard. Womb The Inside Story of Where We All Began. HarperCollins Publishers, 2024.