Maths, medicine and motherhood: A journey through life in bioengineering

Join Alys Clark for her Inaugural lecture exploring how bioengineering can transform reproductive health and early-life care. Our health before birth, and throughout early life, shapes our health and wellbeing in later years. Yet the clinical tools used to investigate fertility, pregnancy, and early-life health are often lower in resolution than those used to study chronic disease in adulthood. Research in reproductive health also presents the challenge of collecting and interpreting data during periods of rapid growth, development, and physiological change. In this lecture, with a few diversions, Alys will take you through a career spent tackling some of the most challenging problems in biology and medicine using bioengineering approaches that bring together maths, physics, and engineering. Along the way, she will highlight the importance of considering sex and gender in the development of tools and devices to support health, and demonstrate how bioengineering can accelerate our understanding of reproductive health, both now and into the future. About Alys Alys grew up mostly in Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom, and enjoyed maths at school enough to enrol in an undergraduate degree in the subject at the University of Oxford. Following that degree, she continued to study maths but with an increasing focus on biology and medicine moving via Adelaide in Australia to Auckland, where she has been for almost 20 years. Her expertise is in providing digital solutions to address complications in reproductive health and pregnancy.