The Women’s Biomedical Research Institute supports a variety of research labs focused on women’s health across the lifespan.
Research Projects
The Institute is involved in bench-to-patient research focusing on reproductive, maternal, and child health. We are exploring the biological foundations of health and disease as well as the individual and societal factors that influence them. Active research in the Institute includes:
- Current fundamental research projects:
- Exploring how vaginal microbes in the lower and upper reproductive tract and the molecular, genetic, and immunological mechanisms by which vaginal microbes interact with epithelial and immune cells in the reproductive tissue work to drive reproductive health and disease.
- Revealing the role of bacterial extracellular vesicles in mediating host-microbe and microbe-microbe interactions in the reproductive tract
- Understanding how intrauterine inflammation shifts immune cell composition and function in the fetus and contributes to fetal brain injury
- Exploring the role of nanoparticles to optimize maternal, fetal, and neonatal health
- Determining the role of mucosal immunity in pregnancy loss
- Exploring the role of microbial-induced epigenetics on epithelial barrier function in the reproductive tract
- Current translational and clinical research projects:
- Exploring the role of the vaginal microbiome and metabolome in adverse pregnancy outcomes among Black birthing communities
- Determining how lived experiences impact pregnancy biology
- Understanding how shifts in functional immunity may cause hypertensive disorders of pregnancy
- Revealing the immune map of pregnancy
- Determining the impact of maternal vaccination on maternal and neonatal health
- Assessing the role of the maternal gut microbiome in maternal immunity
- Determining the role of the gut-immune axis in endometriosis