Mid-career exploration adventure, leg 1

Leg 1 of my grand trek across the country on a quest to figure out if it's possible to teach an old dog new tricks (more specifically, whether a bioengineer can change specialization mid-career) began in Baltimore this week at the annual conference of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASMR). Here, I had to put on my shiniest, most network-y smile as I met loads of new folks, sold my story, and got their feedback on the state of the field and my potential fit in it.

I had a teensy bit of time for Baltimore tourism on Sunday after knocking out the scientific literature reading I'd selected for the day. And when you discover that the city is home to Yelp's 6th most highly rated ice cream shop in a list of America's top 100, how can you spend all day inside?

For more than a year and a half, I was the longest tenured woman on the technical staff at Neuralink. I've lived that leaky pipeline first hand, constantly the only woman in the room, not a single more senior female engineer to look up to as a role model in the office, and I'm absolutely sick of it. I've got some technical skills and I want to start putting them to use to level the playing field. In our thirties, women are the ones stuck paying the price for the family planning choices, and it's not easy: I've watched women drop out of awesome positions while their male counterparts forged ahead at pivotal moments in their career because it wasn't possible to achieve the work-life balance they'd need for parenthood and their biological clocks wouldn't allow them any more time. Meanwhile, our male counterparts have the luxury of picking a timeline (and a younger partner, as needed) to fit their career ambitions. And I've met women who tried to push out their clock only to be met with rude surprises: early menopause, failed IVF cycles, miscarriages, all of which we have to bear with our heads held high, hiding the physical burden while bringing our A-game to the work place. The problem is complex, and needs a variety of solutions, many extending far beyond the scope of a tech start-up or big pharma. Nonetheless, I think I can do something to lighten the burden for my sisters, to ease (or one day delete) women's biological clocks, and that's the direction I'd like to try to run.

The annual ASRM conference is attended by roughly 7000 participants. I put my best big girl networking shoes on and hit the ground running. And pretty consistently, the folks I met pleasantly surprised me with their enthusiasm to meet a female engineer who wanted to bring her technical skills and patient experience into the field.

There was plenty to learn and so many people from whom to gather ideas at ASRM. I met a neuroscientist specialized in sex-based differences in susceptibility to mental illness who'd gotten into fertility research (and clearly demonstrated the variable sperm quality from month to month that corresponds with men's stress levels). I met specialists in oncofertility who are able to cryopreserve women's ovarian tissue prior to cancer treatment and later reimplant this tissue to restore fertility after they're in remission and are ready to pursue a family. I learned that an embryo implanting inside a woman literally merges with the endometrial lining, so maternal and fetal cells combine, with nuclei from each human co-existing in single cells during the process of embryo implantation. I saw presentations from teams who are culturing patient-specific endometrial organoids to better understand issues around fertility and endometriosis. I learned that only seven clinics in the US offer third-trimester abortion care—yikes. I chatted with reps from companies who'd gotten me through my seven-cycle embryo-banking journey back in 2024 and learned more about the tech underlying it: I had no idea that company-specific variation in pre-implantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (PGT-A) results in higher rates of failed embryos at some testing facilities despite equal success rates in implantation. In other words, some companies' shortcomings result in the discarding of perfectly viable embryos. Cool. I learned that bovine embryos are a popular research tool, enough so that companies literally exist to market them to researchers. Apparently this is part of what has made Canada a strong hub for assistive reproductive technology (ART) research, namely their abundance of cows. And, excitingly for me given some of my potential future career prospects, I attended a talk from the inventor of PGT-A who listed in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) as one of the top five frontiers of IVF. Heck, yeah.

Miraculously, I actually found time (and energy!) for a mid-week sunrise run during the conference. With a half-marathon awaiting me in less than a month, I can't afford to slack off during these travels.

By the time I was bussing out of Baltimore yesterday evening, I was utterly exhausted and hardly able to concentrate on my leisure reading, forget the binders stuffed with scientific literature I'd packed. I spent half the bus ride relaxing into a silly medical sitcom on Netflix. This morning I hit LinkedIn bright and early, and the flurry of post-conference messaging began, with some excitingly supportive responses. I've still got the neurotech calls lined up for next week, and the future feels disconcertingly uncertain, but I'm hopeful I may make the leap into a new field, one where I can understand both the scientist/engineer and the patient perspective, and one where I truly believe in the product end goal. (Let's be honest, as scientifically satisfying as a brain-computer implant (BCI) may be, do you really want to see a world where every one of us is implanted? We're glued to our phones enough as is.)

For professional and financial reasons, many of us are postponing parenthood, but women's biology just isn't keeping pace with modern society. Maybe I can do my part to make it a bit less burdensome for women who want to have options on the same timelines as their male counterparts, to give them the freedom to change their minds and their life journey throughout their thirties (and maybe forties) depending on where life takes them. It feels like a pretty decent place to invest my energy.