Oyen named among trailblazing leaders in women’s health, FemTech

Michelle Oyen, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named among the 200 Trailblazing Leaders in Women’s Health and FemTech for 2023 by Women of Wearables.

The list recognizes leaders who have dedicated themselves to enhancing the health and well-being of women through their innovative solutions and products for women’s health concerns. It also recognizes them for increasing awareness and advocacy efforts surrounding women’s health issues.

Oyen is director of the Center for Women’s Health Engineering at Washington University, designed to bring together investigators from the McKelvey School of Engineering and the School of Medicine to collaborate in research, education and training at undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels. The center supports technology transfer, entrepreneurship and outreach both within and outside of the university community and focuses on some of the more understudied and underfunded areas of women’s health, including maternal health and cancers of the reproductive system, from both the engineering and medical research perspectives.

Oyen’s research focuses on engineering approaches for prevention of and intervention into preterm birth. With a background in materials and biomechanics, she has worked on many problems within tissue mechanics and biomimetic materials with an increasing interest in pregnancy and women’s health research. She has research funding from Wellcome Leap’s In Utero program, which aims to create the scalable capacity to measure, model and predict gestational development with a primary goal to reduce stillbirth rates by half.

Originally published on the McKelvey School of Engineering website.