On Cornell Engineering Week: We still have much to unravel about menopause.
Nozomi Nishimura, associate professor of biomedical engineering, says science can help.
Nozomi Nishimura is an associate professor in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University and director of the Menopause Health Engineering initiative, which aims to unravel the science of menopause. Her research expands the use of in vivo imaging techniques to study a variety of disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, cardiac disease and cancer metastasis. Her lab’s strategy is to develop novel tools to image the contribution of multiple physiological systems to diseases, including multiphoton microscopy to image cell dynamics and femtosecond laser ablation and quantitative analysis to dissect function in living systems.
Despite decades of biomedical progress, we still don’t fully understand what happens in the body during menopause, or how its hormonal changes cascade through biological systems like the brain, heart, bones, and metabolic network. The result is that billions of people will experience symptoms and health risks that science can describe, but not yet predict or prevent.
That’s because menopause isn’t a single switch that flips. It’s a systems-level process. As estrogen levels fall, the effects ripple across nearly every organ, influencing metabolism, inflammation, cognition, and even the mechanical properties of tissue. Osteoporosis, for example, is one potential outcome related to menopause, and is tied not only to bone health, but muscle and metabolic health. It also plays a significant role in breast cancer risk and progression.
Understanding intertwined problems like menopause and multi-organ diseases requires integrative, cross-disciplinary science. The Menopause Health Engineering initiative is bringing together experts from engineering, medicine, and life sciences to create computational models, imaging tools, and “body-on-a-chip” platforms that will reveal how menopause reshapes the body over time.
The research initiative aims to inspire a broader movement: to treat menopause not as a medical afterthought, but as a rich, untapped domain for discovery. By elevating menopause research to a national scientific priority, we could transform not just women’s health, but our understanding of human resilience and longevity itself.
Menopause isn’t the end of biology – it’s a key to unlocking it.
