David F. Katz lab at Duke University

Our Mission

Engineers can contribute to the betterment of women’s health in many ways. Our group has sought to contribute to this in a number of interrelated projects, spanning the fundamental to its translation to health care in high resource and low resource settings worldwide. Our current work emphasizes methods for prevention of infection by HIV and other sexually transmitted pathogens, and contraception. However our methods, experimental and computational, extend to broader needs in women’s gynecologic health throughout their lifetimes.

Research Paradigm

• Work backwards from endpoints of understanding and/or its implementation in diagnosis, prevention and therapy.
• As much as possible, seek to understand cause and effect in a deterministic manner, using modeling. As necessary, implement and incorporate statistical and stochastic methods to account for sources of uncertainty that are not fully measured or understood. As necessary, also develop and apply new instruments to characterize different processes (e.g. drug transport) and deduce parameters from those measurements that appear in the models.
• Continually seek to improve communication of this approach and its findings to non-engineers.