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Watching her uncle play a online game when she was a small baby began Shaniel Bowen on her path to turning into a biomedical engineer. The sport, “Metallic Gear Strong 2,” launched her to exoskeletons, wearable units that improve bodily talents.
“The sport piqued my curiosity when it began displaying and discussing exoskeletons,” Bowen says. “I went to the library quickly after to be taught extra about it. That was after I first discovered about biomedical engineering and have become fascinated about pursuing it as a career.”
Quick-forward to her senior 12 months on the College of Connecticut. Bowen and an interdisciplinary group of biomedical, electrical, and pc engineers developed a tool utilizing musculoskeletal modeling and computer-aided design that would assist individuals with leg weak spot to face. The system supplied simply sufficient help that the particular person would nonetheless use their very own muscle tissues, strengthening them with repeated use. Bowen was on her approach to creating her personal exoskeleton.
That modified, nonetheless, when she was beginning graduate college and was identified with ovarian torsion brought on by a big ovarian teratoma.
Not solely was she coping with a severe medical situation, however as a Black girl raised by Jamaican immigrants, she was personally confronted with inequities in well being care that lead to discrepancies in remedy.
“Like many Black, Indigenous, and folks of shade (BIPOC) girls, I used to be initially apprehensive and discouraged from searching for medical care for a very long time, which led me to trivialize my signs,” Bowen says. “A severe gynecological situation that required surgical procedure was virtually left untreated.”
After her surgical procedure, Bowen pivoted from her work in human motion and biodynamics to biomedical engineering centered on girls’s well being.
“I turned fascinated about making use of my engineering experience to girls’s well being points so as to acquire a greater understanding of assorted pathologies from a biomechanics perspective and to carry consciousness not solely to people in my area but additionally to girls who are suffering from or could also be in danger for these situations,” she says.
Throughout her doctoral program, Bowen studied the consequences of age and pelvic reconstructive surgical procedure on feminine pelvic anatomy and performance utilizing computational modeling. She obtained a Ford Basis Fellowship from the Nationwide Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medication to check the biomechanical processes concerned in pelvic organ prolapse (POP), a standard situation that may trigger excessive discomfort, sexual dysfunction, and incontinence. POP could be surgically corrected, however the restore usually fails inside 5 years, and it’s unclear precisely why. Bowen’s analysis got down to develop a device to raised assess the biomechanics of such failures and to forestall them.
“It’s hoped that our findings, primarily based on postoperative imaging and medical information, will encourage longitudinal trials and research that incorporate each medical and engineering approaches to raised perceive POP surgical procedures and pelvic ground operate and dysfunction following pelvic reconstructive procedures,” she says.
After incomes her PhD on the College of Pittsburgh, Bowen obtained a number of provides to do postdoctoral analysis. She selected the MIT Faculty of Engineering’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for Engineering Excellence and began work within the Edelman Lab in September 2023.
“This system and my principal investigators have been essentially the most supportive of me exploring my analysis pursuits in girls’s sexual anatomy and well being,” she says, “and studying experimental strategies from the bottom up, provided that my major expertise is computational.”
Elazer Edelman, the Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science, director of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, professor of medication at Harvard Medical Faculty, and senior attending doctor within the coronary care unit at Brigham and Girls’s Hospital in Boston, speaks admiringly of Bowen and her analysis.
“I like working with and studying from Shaniel — she is an inspiration and inventive spirit who’s treading in new areas and has the potential so as to add to what we all know of well being and physiology and alter our apply of medication,” says Edelman.
The Edelman Lab was “one of many few,” Bowen says she discovered “with a longstanding dedication to public outreach,” which has been a constant endeavor all through her tutorial profession.
For practically 10 years, Bowen has volunteered in mentoring and STEM outreach applications for college students of all ages — together with at her previous highschool, on the universities she has attended, and in underserved communities. At the moment, Bowen devotes a portion of her time to outreach, well being promotion, and training, primarily specializing in girls’s well being points.
“My analysis collaborators and I’ve labored towards eradicating the stigma and misconceptions round girls’s anatomy and well being,” she says, explaining that serving to younger girls from underserved communities to be extra comfy with and higher knowledgeable about girls’s anatomy and well being is “integral to well being fairness and inclusion.” Such work additionally encourages younger girls to think about careers in STEM and girls’s well being, she says.
“It’s crucial that ladies of numerous experiences and views become involved in STEM to develop the subsequent technology of scientists and advocates to enhance the remedy of well being situations for all girls.”
A part of Bowen’s postdoctoral analysis entails complementing her computational talents by buying and bettering her abilities in biochemistry and cell biology, and tissue mechanics and engineering. Her present work on how clitoral anatomy pertains to sexual operate, particularly after gynecological surgical procedure, explores a subject that has seen little analysis, Bowen says, including that her work may enhance postoperative sexual operate outcomes.
The MIT Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for Engineering Excellence — which, whereas emphasizing analysis, additionally supplies assets and helps fellows to construct knowledgeable community — has supplied a wonderful system of assist, Bowen says.
“It has actually helped me be taught and discover completely different profession paths whereas having an incredible assist system of fellows and workers which have supplied continued motivation and life recommendation all through the ups and downs of navigating by my postdoctoral coaching and job search,” she says.
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