Conference: ElevateHER: Engineering Innovations for Women's Health Discovery

ElevateHER会议（妇女健康发现中的工程创新）旨在汇集生物医学工程师和科学家，共同确定妇女健康工程中的挑战和机遇。这些将通过主题演讲、主持小组讨论、海报会议和所有参与者之间的指导讨论来确定。妇女健康的广义定义是对妇女一生产生不成比例影响的所有生物过程。会议的目的是确定如何应用工程工具来改善妇女健康的基本知识。通过汇集专家并进行重点讨论，本次会议将确定利用工程技术研究妇女健康的创造性新方法。会议的研究结果将被整理成一份同行评议的手稿，这将增加从事妇女健康工程研究的科学家和工程师的数量。“妇女健康发现中的工程创新”会议的两个驱动问题是：(1)目前如何使用工程技术来推动妇女健康发现中的创新？(2)工程工具有哪些机会解决妇女健康方面的基本知识差距？利用这些指导性问题，将讨论妇女健康的主题，将其广义地定义为对妇女一生产生不成比例影响的所有条件。将探索和确定如何将以下核心类别的工程工具当前应用于妇女健康工程：(1)生物材料和组织工程；(2)生物力学与力学生物学；(3)器件、传感器和光子学；(4)免疫工程。通过召集各种生物医学工程师和科学家，会议旨在利用生物医学技术的变革潜力，在妇女健康方面取得根本性发现。要使会议取得成功，就必须查明和突出在妇女保健方面不常用的工程工具，从而在妇女保健工程领域促进新的合作和探索途径。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The ElevateHER conference (Engineering Innovations in Women’s Health Discovery) aims to bring together a confluence of biomedical engineers and scientists to collectively identify challenges and opportunities in women’s health engineering. These will be identified by keynote talks, moderated panel discussions, poster sessions, and guided discussions amongst all participants. Women’s health is broadly defined as all biological processes that disproportionately impact women across their lifespan. The conference aims to identify how engineering tools can be applied to improve fundamental knowledge of women's health. By bringing together experts and conducting focused discussions, this conference will identify creative new ways that engineering technologies can be used to research women’s health. The findings from the conference will be organized into a peer-reviewed manuscript that will increase the number of scientists and engineers that engage in women’s health engineering research.Two driving questions for the ElevateHER (Engineering Innovations in Women’s Health Discovery) conference are: (1) How are engineering technologies used to currently drive innovations in women’s health discovery? (2) What opportunities lie within engineering tools to address fundamental knowledge gaps in women’s health? Using these guiding questions, the theme of women’s health, defined broadly as all conditions that disproportionately impact women across their lifespan, will be addressed. How engineering tools in the following core categories are applied currently to women’s health engineering will be explored and identified: (1) Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering; (2) Biomechanics and Mechanobiology; (3) Devices, Sensors and Photonics; (4) Immuno-engineering. By convening a diverse group of biomedical engineers and scientists, the conference aims to leverage biomedical technologies' transformative potential to make fundamental discoveries in women's health. Success for the conference will be achieved by identifying and highlighting engineering tools not commonly used in the context of women’s health, thereby catalyzing new collaborative and exploratory pathways within women’s health engineering.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.