The Women for Women Innovation Fund, created by WSU alumnus Erin Cummings, provides women innovators, entrepreneurs, and leaders seed money to get their ventures off the ground.
The award dispersed fall of 2022 went to two women led ventures.
Chinelo Ogogor
Wombcare
During her Biomedical Engineering studies at Wichita State University, Chinelo began pursuing Wombcare.
The inspiration for Wombcare came from her work in a women’s health care clinic. She discovered “…that many of its practices and procedures are outdated and do not accommodate or include all types of women. As a woman of color, I care about this because my community has higher mortality and morbidity rates after C-sections and natural births.” To reduce surgical site infections that occur during c-sections performed on marginalized groups, she began working on Wombcare, a product that “…will implement biocompatible skin solutions.”
The funding makes it possible for Chinelo “…to start designing and filing for patents, as well as access to laboratory environments such as wet labs where I could synthesize polymer plastics.”
Anna Brake, Alana Cahill, Nina Daruwala, Logyn Johnson, Bri Pfeifer
XX Menstrual Monitoring
Hailing from different engineering backgrounds, this group of women entrepreneurs is working on XX Menstrual Monitoring, a device providing menstruating individuals a more reliable means of predicting periods through continual hormone monitoring.
Suffering from irregular periods herself, Alana Cahill "always have to guess when my next period is going to start. Once I had open conversations about menstruation, I found that this is a pretty common occurrence, especially in those with conditions like PCOS and endometriosis." Having found a gap in the marketplace, Alana brought the idea to the group she was apart of for a class, and their brainstorming has led them to begin exploring adapting technology used in the treatment of diabetes.
With the aid of Women for Women Innovation Award, the group aims to begin working on creating a functional prototype and to test a greater range of glucose monitors.
"This award absolutely means the world to my group and I. To know that other people think we have a good idea and are willing to give us greater resources to make it a reality has given all of us an extra boost of confidence and motivation to continue with the project even after the Koch Innovation Challenge."
The women involved in these ventures addressed very different market pains, and we look forward to seeing where their venture goes moving forward!