About This Webinar
Nirmala (Nimmi) Ramanujam, Ph.D., is Robert W. Carr Jr. professor of Biomedical Engineering, professor in Pharmacology & Cancer Biology and Global Health, and founding director of the Global Women’s Health Technologies at Duke University. She will speak on optical tools and techniques she is developing for cancer screening in resource-limited settings.
The pocket colposcope has been designed to increase access to cervical cancer screening and diagnosis in the primary care setting.
Professor Ramanujam is leading a multi-disciplinary effort to translate these technologies to clinical applications in the breast and cervix. In addition to her academic efforts, professor Ramanujam has spun out a company, Zenalux, to commercialize several of the technologies developed in her lab and is developing and creating the processes to move technologies further down the commercialization pipeline within Duke. She is bringing together key opinion leaders as close partners during the technology conceptualization and development phases, working with industry partners to transform prototypes into products and navigating regulatory clearance in-house. This gives technologies that are designed to address health disparities the greatest chance of having impact.
Ramanujam earned her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Texas, Austin and trained as an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to her tenure at Duke, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is a Fellow of OSA, The Optical Society of America; SPIE; and AIMBE, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.