Michelle Oyen

BMES Member, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Wayne State University  

Michelle Oyen's great-grandmother was one of 15 children. She spent the vast majority of her adult life pregnant, nursing, and raising babies. No career. No education. No choices. Modern contraception — built on drug delivery, biomaterials, and computational modeling of how drugs interact with the body — changed that within a single generation. 

"This has changed the world for women in a very short period of time," Oyen says. 

Now she's working on another part of women's health that most people never connect to engineering: pregnancy itself. Her lab studies the placenta — the only disposable human organ — using ultrasound imaging and computer models to detect when it's failing before a pregnancy ends in stillbirth. The challenge is that there's no good animal model for human pregnancy. "Mice don't menstruate," she says. Engineering tools may be the only way to understand what's been a black box for centuries.