A Technological Approach to Tackling Invisible Barriers to Cancer Progression and Death

Nimmi Ramanujam, PhD

Professor and Director

Center for Global Women’s Health Technologies

Robert W. Carr, Jr. Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Duke University

Abstract: One technology she and her team has developed to achieve health care impact is the Pocket Colposcope, which has the potential to revolutionize cervical cancer screening in low resource communities by enhancing the effectiveness and scalability of the screening process, reducing loss to follow up and guiding effective treatment decisions. The Pocket colpsocope has been deployed in 8 countries in four continents and impacted several thousand women. Her team has also designed a speculum-free self-screening colposcope called the Callascope to make cervical cancer screening more accessible by bringing this tool of discovery into the hands and homes of individuals. The powerful reflections of individuals who have used the Callascope has now led to a public awareness campaign called the Calla campaign to empower women to explore their bodies through technology, storytelling and art and comprises educational workshops for women, a multi-media art exhibition, and a documentary film. Design is at the heart of the innovation that underlies the Pocket and Callascope and one where women are designing for women. However, training in design thinking is only accessible to a privileged few. Dr. Ramanujam has created a unique model to make design thinking pervasive to women and girls in the least resourced parts of the world, and in the process has created teachers, innovators and entrepreneurs. The program, Ignite, has trained more than 50 university students to teach design thinking to more than 1000 students in low resource communities in Kenya, India, Guatemala and the U.S. The students in those communities then perpetuate the knowledge by maintaining that virtuous cycle within their own communities.

Bio: Dr. Ramanujam is an innovator, educator, and entrepreneur. Her mission is to develop technology to have wide reaching impact in 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 globally. Dr. Ramanujam’s research on women’s cancers focus on designing innovations that enable complex referral services, often reserved for hospitals, to be accessible at the primary care level for cancer prevention and to develop tools that will make cancer treatment more effective and efficient. Through her programs Dr. Ramanujam has created an international community that is growing exponentially and across a number of different sectors including academia, industry, non- governmental organizations and the government. She has received recognition for her work through the TR100 Young Innovator Award from MIT, the Global Indus Technovator award from MIT, Era of Hope Scholar awards from the DOD, the Stasnell Family award from the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke and the Emerging Leader in Global Health Award from the Consortium of Universities in Global Health. She is a fellow of several optical and biomedical engineering societies including OSA, SPIE, AIMBE. She has also been elected to the National Academy of Inventors. She is co-editor of the Handbook of Biomedical Optics. She has presented the global impact of her work at the United Nations.