Center Director
Executive Director
Assistant Professor
Dr. Ramanujam is the Robert W. Carr Professor of Biomedical Engineering, a faculty member in the Global Health Institute, Department of Pharmacology and Cell Biology at Duke University. Dr. Ramanujam is an innovator, educator, and entrepreneur. Her mission is to develop technology that will have a wide-reaching impact in women’s health. She directs the center for Global Women’s Health Technologies at Duke where she empowers trainees at Duke and beyond to create impactful solutions to improve the lives of women and girls globally. Dr. Ramanujam’s research focuses on breast and cervical cancer. Her goals are to design innovations that enable complex referral services often reserved for hospitals to be accessible at the community/primary care level, develop technologies to see and treat women with early stage disease in one visit and to develop tools that will make cancer treatment more effective and efficient.
Marlee is a founding member of the Center for Global Women’s Health Technologies, where she has served since 2007. Since being named Executive Director in 2018, Marlee has built and leads a diverse set of multidisciplinary educational programs, spearheads the Center’s international collaborations which focus on the clinical implementation of technologies developed at Duke, and has become widely successful in securing financial support for Center related research and education. Her research efforts focus on generating a deeper understanding of the scaling and adoption of novel healthcare innovations as well as the potential barriers to ultimate market acceptance.Additionally, she works with many members of the Pratt community as well as faculty, staff and students in numerous other departments across campus including, DGHI, Surgery, Ob/Gyn, Pathology and FUQUA and the Margolis Center for Health Policy. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of Massachusetts, where she also received a M.S. in Molecular and Cellular Biology.
Dr. Crouch began his appointment as the Center’s Assistant Director of Research in March 2020 and became an assistant professor, making him the Center's first junior faculty member, in September 2020. Dr. Crouch received a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University in 2018 under the mentorship of Dr. Ramanujam. Now, he works with Dr. Ramanujam and Marlee Krieger to bring GWHT's objectives to fruition. He is responsible for directing the Center’s research initiatives through strategic planning, funding opportunity identification, and mentoring of the graduate students, staff, and post-doctorals. Dr. Crouch oversees the three main research initiatives within the Center: cervical pre-cancer imaging, breast cancer imaging, and cancer ablation. He is planing to secure one million dollars of federal funding for The Center for Global Women's Health Technologies by 2025, and he is excited to work with the Center's staff and students to accomplish GWHT's mission.