Nimmi Ramanujam
Professor, Biomedical Engineering and Global Health
Director, Center for Global Women's Health Technologies
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Nimmi Ramanujam
Professor, Biomedical Engineering and Global Health
Director, Center for Global Women's Health Technologies
Dr. Ramanujam is the Robert W. Carr Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and also a faculty member in the Global Health Institute and Dept. Pharmacology and Cell Biology at Duke University. She is an innovator, educator and entrepreneur and her mission is to develop and leverage technology to have the most wide reaching impact in women’s health. She directs the center for Global Women’s Health Technologies (GWHT), a partnership between the Pratt School of Engineering and the Duke Global Health Institute. Through the GWHT, she is empowering her trainees at Duke and beyond to be agents of change - providing them with the knowledge, confidence and critical thinking skills to create impactful solutions to improve women’s lives. Dr. Ramanujam’s research focuses on womens’ cancers and in particular breast and cervical cancer. Her goals are to design innovations that enable complex referral services often reserved for hospitals to be accessible at the community/primary care level, develop technologies to see and treat women with early stage disease in one visit and to develop tools that will make cancer treatment more effective and efficient. One example of a technology she and her team has developed to achieve health care impact is the Pocket Colposcope. The Pocket colposcope 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 treatment decisions. Women around the world are disproportionately impacted by health, educational and economic inequities. Thus, much of Dr. Ramanujam’s work has a global reach. Countries she and her team have worked in include India, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Peru, Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti and the U.S. These interactions have resulted in a community that is growing exponentially and has an international reach across a number of different sectors including academia, industry, non-governmental organizations and the government.
Projects
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Bass Connections Peru
Peru
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POCkeT Colposcope in Mombasa, Kenya
Kenya
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A Viable Solution for a See-and-Treat Paradigm for Cervical Pre-cancer in Africa
Tanzania
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Culturally Appropriate Screening and Diagnosis of Cervical Cancer in East Africa
Kenya, Tanzania, Peru, India
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Integration of mHealth with Scalable Screening Tool for Cervical Cancer in LMICs
Tanzania, Kenya
- Toward a Viable Solution for a See-and-Treat Paradigm for Cervical Pre-cancer in East Africa Using an Automated Colposcpectroscope
- Smart Optical Sensor for Detection of Cervical Cancer in the Developing World
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Development of Low Cost Optical Technologies for Cervical Pre-Cancer Detection
Haiti
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Engineering Club at WISER NGO
United States, Kenya
Publications
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Natarajan J, Krieger M, Ramanujam N, Vashist S, Bhatla N. Feasibility and Outcome of Training Field Workers to Use the Transvaginal Colposcope for Point of Care Diagnosis and Management of Precancerous Cervical Lesions. Indian Journal of Gynecologic Oncology. 2023 Mar 1;21(1).Natarajan J, Mathur S, Vishnubhatla S, Kumar S, Vashist S, Ramanujam N, et al. Can portable Colposcopes Replace Standard-of-care Colposcopes? A Crossover Trial of Two Portable Colposcopes with a Standard-of-Care Video Colposcope. Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention : Apjcp. 2022 Dec;23(12):4013–21.Coole JB, Brenes D, Possati-Resende JC, Antoniazzi M, Fonseca BDO, Maker Y, et al. Development of a multimodal mobile colposcope for real-time cervical cancer detection. Biomedical Optics Express. 2022 Oct;13(10):5116–30.Ramanujam N, Madonna M. Editorial overview: Biomedical engineering and women's health: Breaking new ground in gender- and sex-specific research. Current Opinion in Biomedical Engineering. 2022 Jun 1;22.
See more publications at Scholars@Duke