2023 IEEE Biomedical Engineering Award Recipient, Dr. Ramanujam is an innovator, educator, and entrepreneur. Her mission is to develop technology that has wide-reaching impacts on women’s health. She directs the Center for Global Women’s Health Technologies at Duke where she empowers trainees at Duke and beyond to create impactful solutions to improve the lives of women and girls globally.
Dr. Ramanujam’s research on women’s cancers focuses on designing innovations that enable complex referral services, often reserved for hospitals, to be accessible at the primary care level for cancer prevention and make cancer treatment more effective and efficient.
Women-Inspired Strategies for Health (WISH), a project launched in 2020, by Professors Nimmi Ramanujam and Megan Huchko, along with their global collaborators, provides tools designed to offer promising alternatives to the expensive colposcopes that are used in most cervical exams. One version provides a simple solution for women; examining themselves at home. This provides increased screening in low- to middle-income countries, where there is a high percentage of cervical cancer deaths.
Dr. Ramanujam has demonstrated her work’s global impact through presentations at the United Nations and TEDx events, and several national and international plenary talks.
She has received many awards and recognitions for her work and her work has been featured in several media outlets including ABC News, Wired Magazine, NPR, and several podcasts.
She also served as a panelist on the Navigating the Technology Industry at the 2023 IEEE VIC Summit and Honors Ceremony. View the session: https://ieeetv.ieee.org/channels/ieee_awards/2023-ieee-vic-summit-navigating-the-technology-industry-panel