A new blog for the Institute for Women’s Health Research Launched today!   Check it out here.

Established in November of 2007, the Institute for Women’s Health Research was created at Northwestern University to help accelerate basic science and clinical research that will advance our knowledge of women’s health. Their mission is to increase the women’s health research portfolio at Northwestern University and their clinical affiliates; they focus on 5 ambitious goals to accomplish this mission:

• To foster research that explores the sex and gender determinants of health and disease with an emphasis on women
• To encourage interdisciplinary research, diversity inclusiveness and a comprehensive approach to women’s health research
• To prepare researchers, scientists and clinicians who understand the sex and gender determinants of health and disease; develop leadership among women and girls interested in science
• To accelerate the translation of basic science research into clinical practice
• To become the authoritative resource for the community on women’s health issues and provide opportunities for the community to engage in the advancement of women’s health

The Office of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Partnerships in the School of Education (OSEP) at NU is excited that a second high school biology teacher, David Bain, from Grayslake North High School in Illinois, will also be participating in the Onco internships. We look forward to seeing what kinds of real-world activities the teachers will come up with to take back to the classroom. Just as the teachers and college students will get research mentoring, the students will also benefit professionally from working side-by-side with the teachers. Among the first stimulus dollars Northwestern is getting from the National Cancer Institute, the money allows Northwestern to pursue two important goals: bring relevant lab activities to teachers around the country and bring girls through the pipeline toward careers in science. “It’s great to be able to use stimulus funding to provide four full-time paid summer positions at a time when any summer employment is difficult to find. We suspect that one day these young women will be engaged in careers in science and will look back at their summer positions as instrumental in launching them on a path to success,” said Kemi Jona, director of OSEP.

Click here to see the press release at NORTHWESTERN NEWS:
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2009/06/stimulus.html

Click here to see another blog post about the internships: http://blog.oncofertility.northwestern.edu/2009/06/northwestern-stimulus-funding/

I’m the project director for the Office of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education Partnerships (referred to as “OSEP”) in the School of Education and Social Policy (SESP) on Northwestern’s Evanston campus. My MA is in linguistics from Columbia University and my BA is in communications theory with a concentration in media studies from New York University; I am currently pursuing an MBA. My background is in academic publishing and marketing. I work with Dr. Kemi Jona, who is director of OSEP and a co-PI (principal investigator) on the Oncofertility project. His title is Learning Strategist, School of Continuing Studies and Research Associate Professor, Learning Sciences. Liaison to NU’s PR office and other NU departments, as well as Oncofertility’s ONSEN partners, I coordinate marketing and publishing efforts for OSEP’s work in education.

Read the new article here.

The inaugural session of the Cardiology Summer Academy just ended. It gave seniors from the Young Women’s Leadership Academy Charter School a chance to experience the world of the heart through real-life experiences at Northwestern Memorial’s Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute. The program’s success was noted in an article by the Chicago Tribune.

The week-long summer experience for the small group of high school students is one of the science academies run by the Women’s Health Science Program at the Feinberg School of Medicine. The Summer Academy is designed to educate female high school students who are considering pursuing a career in science or medicine and to teach them about cardiology and cardiovascular health.

Megan Faurot is the director of education programs for the Institute for Women’s Health Research at Feinberg. She is also in charge of the Oncofertility Saturday Academy. “My goal is to create engaging and authentic learning experiences for high school girls to inspire and prepare them to successfully pursue careers in science and medicine,” she said.

The students participate in different activities such as watching cardiac surgery, performing dissections and getting CPR certified. Another major goal of the program is to increase the students’ knowledge of their own heart health so the curriculum also includes daily personal training sessions, lectures on heart disease and prevention and heart-healthy cooking demonstrations and meals.

Marina Peluffo and Teresa Woodruff stand in front of the abstract poster Peluffo won an award for at the 15th World Congress on IVF in Geneva, Switzerland in April 2009.

Marina Peluffo, an Oncofertility Consortium member from Portland, Oregon, won an award for her poster abstract “Cumulus Oocyte Complexes from Small Antral Follicles during the Early Follicular Phase of Spontaneous Cycles in Rhesus Monkeys Can Expand and Yield Oocytes Capable of Maturation In Vitro”.

Her poster was presented at the 15th World Congress on IVF in Geneva, Switzerland earlier this year. Teresa Woodruff also attended the Congress in April and was one of the 100 plenary speakers to address close to 750 participants from 67 different countries. For more information about the Congress go to the ISIVF Web site.

To view our previous entry on the World Congress, click here: Oncofertility at the 15th World Congress on IVF.

I started in the Woodruff Lab in August ’08 as a graduate student working on my PhD. I earned my BS in Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development from the University of Minnesota in ’05 where I worked in a lab that studied capacitation, a process that sperm must go through before they can fertilize an egg. My project now is concentrated on studying the importance of metal ions during meiotic maturation in mouse oocytes. Metal ions are important to maintaining the structure and function of many proteins, and I’m trying to find out how changing their availability affects the oocyte. I hope that my work will help us understand the basic biology of oocyte maturation and how conditions used clinically can be optimized to produce the healthy oocytes.

My name is Lisa Campo-Engelstein and I am a new postdoctoral fellow in bioethics. I received a B.A. from Middlebury College, with a double major in philosophy and pre-med, as well as a minor in sociology. I did my graduate work at Michigan State University in philosophy with a focus on bioethics, feminist theory, and social/political philosophy. The title of my Masters thesis was “A Feminist Critique of Rational Democratic Deliberation for Health Care Rationing” and the title of my dissertation was “Contraceptive Responsibility: Trust, Gender, and Ideology.” I am now examining ethical issues surrounding Oncofertility, especially as they relate to gender and sexuality, justice and allocation, and philosophical understandings of disease.

Executive Director of the Oncofertility Consortium, Marybeth Gerrity was interviewed in a Medill Reports article by Anna Swindle, Making children possible: A fertility doctor’s journey.

The article talks about Marybeth’s life as it led up to her work in the field of Oncofertility from her research in how to prevent pregnancy to what she does now in fertility preservation techniques. Check it out!

Every summer, Teresa Woodruff sends out a summer reading list to the people in her lab. Because there isn’t much of a global perspective on Oncofertility yet, this year’s theme is “Global Perspectives on Reproduction” to prepare, hopefully, to create partnerships with the World Health Organization and other global health organizations.

The reading list will provide a foundation and an entry-point into the existing literature and includes some of the recent papers from the Oncofertility Consortium and, of course, the Oncofertility book by Teresa Woodruff (recently reviewed in the journal Fertility and Sterility — see blog entry dated June 4th).

Here is a copy of Teresa’s list:

1. Woodruff, Teresa K. and Snyder, Karrie Ann Sr.  Oncofertility: Fertility Preservation for Cancer Survivors.  Springer, 2007.

2. Inhorn, Monica C and Van Balen, Frank.  Infertility Around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies.   University of California Press, 2002.

3. Ginsburb, Faye D and Rapp, Ranya.  Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction.  University of California Press, 1995.

4. Edwards, Jeanette; Franklin, Sarah; Hirsch, Eric; Price, Francis; and Strathern, Marilyn.  Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception.  Routledge, 1999.

5. Ellison, Peter T.  On Fertile Ground: A Natural History of Human Reproduction.  Harvard University Press, 2001.

6. Runowicz, Carolyn D., Petrek, Jeanne A. and Gansler, Ted S.  Women in Cancer: A Thorough and Compassionate Resource for Patients and Their Families.

7. Heiney, Sue P., Hermann, Joan F., Bruss, Katherine V., and Fincannon, Joy L..  Cancer in the Family: Helping Children Cope with a Parent’s Illness.  2001.

8. Eyre, Harmon J., Lange, Diane Partie, and Morris, Lois B.  Informed Decision: The Complete Book of Cancer Diagnosis, Treatment, and Recovery.   Viking, 1997.

9. Shenfield, Francoise and Sureau, Claude.  Contemporary Ethical Dilemmas in Assisted Reproduction.  Informahealthcare, 2006.