Insider Series Transcript: Teresa Woodruff ’89 PhD (’04 P)

Al Cubbage: Good afternoon, and welcome to the Northwestern University Leadership Circle Insider series. Today, we've got a terrific program ahead of us, so let me start off the bat with an interesting question: Where are the women? It's a question Teresa Woodruff has asked early and often in her career as a biologist. Working at a biotech firm after graduate school, she was surprised to learn that the first studies for a new heart attack and stroke treatment included data on 50,000 men, but no women. Since then, as a Northwestern professor, she has fought to ensure that scientists consider sex as a biological factor in their research and clinical trials.

Dr. Woodruff's own research brings together the fields of oncology and fertility. Work in her lab is giving new hope to women who want to preserve their fertility after undergoing cancer treatment. Before that, the focus was largely on men. As a leading scientist, Dr. Woodruff serves as a mentor and role model for women in her field. Now, she's also taken on a new role; dean of the graduate school where she has the ability and the opportunity to influence graduate education and students throughout the disciplines here at Northwestern. She encourages all her students to pursue their interests boldly, and one of them, Kelly McKinnon, joins us today for the NULC Insider series, along with Dr. Woodruff.

I'm Al Cubbage, the moderator. I'm the vice president of university relations at Northwestern University, and a member of the Leadership Circle. I'm also an adjunct professor at Medill, and someone who has been at Northwestern for more than 20 years, so it's always a great opportunity to do this. I'd like to welcome our fellow NULC members and thank them for joining the NULC Insider Series. The series gives the members of the Leadership Circle an inside view of what's happening at Northwestern, and direct access to top university leaders and some of our top faculty.

For all of you who are members of the Leadership Circle, thanks very much for your generosity. It's folks like you, leadership donors like you, who have really helped propel Northwestern to its place, which is ... as the PR guy, I got to say it. I think we're one of the top universities, the top world's leading research universities.

So, let me introduce Dr. Woodruff now. She entered her PhD at Northwestern, so she's also an alum, which is great, and today, she wears many hats at the University. She founded and directs the Women's Health Research Institute, she teaches in the Feinberg School of Medicine, where she is the Thomas J. Watkins Memorial Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology. And, as I mentioned, she became dean of The Graduate School just last fall.

Dr. Woodruff is an internationally recognized expert in ovarian biology and women's reproductive health. She coined the term oncofertility to describe the merging of two fields; oncology and fertility. She and her husband, Professor Tom O'Hallaran, are the parents of a Northwestern graduate, and they're also longtime NULC members.

Kelly McKinnon, who we're very pleased to have with us today, is a PhD candidate in the Driskill Graduate Program in Life Sciences here at Northwestern. She joined the Woodruff Lab in 2014, where she is part of a team of researchers working to develop a female reproductive tract that functions outside of the human body. Our speakers have won numerous awards for their research, and in 2011, President Obama presented Dr. Woodruff with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science Mentoring. Mentoring is one focus of today's session.

Al Cubbage: So, we want to thank listeners who have already submitted questions for their speakers. If you're joining us online and want to submit a question, you can type it into the Q&A box at the bottom of your computer screen. We'll try to respond to as many questions as we can, as our discussion will last about 45 minutes. So, let's get started. Teresa, Kelly—welcome.

Teresa Woodruff: Thank you.

Al Cubbage: Tell us what's new. First, in terms of graduate education, I guess generally, and also, what's new in the lab?

Teresa Woodruff: Those are great questions. The first thing I will say is, thank you very much for inviting us to be here. We're both very excited to be part of this NULC series, and to talk a little bit about our science and our career paths. What's new are a couple of things. One is, as you said, I'm the new dean of The Graduate School at Northwestern. As an alumna of the University, getting my PhD here, I'm just really thrilled to be able to help guide the University towards the excellence that all of our graduate students, the excellent careers that I think all of our graduate students can become. It's been a little bit of a whirlwind, having both the lab and being the dean of The Graduate School, but it's been really a lot of fun.

And Kelly McKinnon is one example of one of our great PhD students, and she is at the end of her career, about to finish up her dissertation.

Kelly McKinnon: Right. I'll soon be an alumna too, and I'm planning on continuing at Northwestern for the next stage, too. And so, I joined Teresa's lab in 2014, and the fact that she is now the dean of The Graduate School I think speaks a lot for her mentorship. She has a very unique style of mentorship, and the fact that she's now going to be able to bring that to the entire Graduate School, I think is really a good thing for the school.

Teresa Woodruff: One of the things I think about mentoring, Al, is that a lot of times, we think about the career ladder; that we're going one rung at a time, up toward a destination, and I think more in terms of lattice. I think more three dimensionally. I think that in fact, as you're moving along, you're also making vital connections. That you're linking out to other fields and disciplines, and to other people.

And I think one of the things that we do is, we're fairly fearless in terms of finding the technology that's going to answer a question. We're not trying to stay uniquely on one topic, but rather, trying to say, "How could we solve fertility consequences of chemotherapeutic treatments for young cancer patients?" Or, "How could we understand better the female reproductive tract?" And many other problems where we now bring in technology. And in order to be really successful in my lab, the students have to be similarly fearless, kind of ready to dangle their feet out over the edge of a precipice and say, "Okay, we're going to build up the competency to be able to answer these problems." So, being really problem focused, and being able to bring technology in and creating that career lattice is really something that I like to think about.

Al Cubbage: And I guess that's a question that occurred to me right off the bat, is you've had a career that, to a great extent, has been within the lab itself. Now you've really taken on a new role as the dean of The Graduate School. I mean, Northwestern's put a lot of emphasis and frankly resources into graduate education over the last decade or so.

Teresa Woodruff: Right.

Al Cubbage: Why is graduate education important? Not just for Northwestern, but in general, for society.

Teresa Woodruff: To me, these are the next leaders. Anything that is going to be transformed largely comes from graduate education at the institution. We go from what I call horizontal learning to vertical learning. Our undergraduates are here getting a great education on what's already known. If you imagine a textbook, you open that textbook and our undergraduates are asked to, and welcomed into, the knowledge of that textbook. But then they're also asked to learn what exists. Go to the back of the book and give us the answers.

What you do in graduate education is you close that book and you turn it vertically. It is vertical learning, where you're now asking questions, and the solution is not necessarily known. So, you are trying to create that next generation of knowledge that will be someone else's textbooks. So, our graduate population at Northwestern is every day coming to grips with problems that are about our very selves and who we are, and about the environment around us, and about how to heal, and ensure what we can maintain health, but that tomorrow's patient is going to be treated better than today's.

So, being able to enable our humanist social scientists and scientists across this great institution is really an exciting opportunity, and the phenotype of Northwestern really is something that's within our motto; the "and" is in our DNA. I really see that as a fundamental trait of what it is to be at Northwestern; that we are moving across different ideas and different disciplines, and between different mentors, and we do this really in an easy way. We have lowered the barriers as an institution to reaching out to others, to be able to bring new technologies in, which is one of the examples of what Kelly and I have been able to do in some of the technologies that we've worked through.

Al Cubbage: Good. Good, good. Kelly, tell us a little bit about what you've been working on. I'm curious, how's it been going for you as graduate student here at Northwestern?

Kelly McKinnon: Well, I've had a great time. My first project when I joined the Woodruff Lab was Evatar, so that is an ex vivo female reproductive tract in a microfluidic system.

Al Cubbage: And ex vivo means ...

Kelly McKinnon: Outside of the body.

Al Cubbage: Thank you. That helps.

Kelly McKinnon: It's basically, we have an ovary, a fallopian tube culture, a uterine culture, a cervix culture, and I worked on the cervix culture.

Al Cubbage: And Dr. Woodruff, why would you do that?

Teresa Woodruff: Well, you know, that's a great question, and in fact, when I first—

Al Cubbage: What prompted you to do this?

Teresa Woodruff: I know, it's kind of a crazy idea, isn't it? When I first ... Actually, it was DARPA that said, "We need to have ways for organs to communicate outside the body, so that actually, in times of war, if there was a new agent, we could be able to mitigate that more easily and more rapidly." So, they put out a call for grants that said basically, let's try and put 10 organs connected into one system in a dish. They didn't care what that dish looked like; they just wanted the organs to communicate.

When I heard about that, I thought it was the craziest thing I'd ever heard. And then I started really thinking deeply, and fundamentally, I'm an endocrinologist. I study how organs communicate with each other through small molecules called hormones. So I'm interested in how the ovary connects not only to the rest of the reproductive tract, but to the bone, and to the heart.

So, after thinking a little bit more about this, I thought, "Well, the ideal set of organs to connect would actually be from the reproductive system, because we would then be able to look in the abstract, anyway, how estrogens and progesterones would act on all these other tissues." And fundamentally, we don't have any way to model that. The way traditional science has done is with a petri dish, and you'll remember a petri dish from when you were in school, so everybody—

Al Cubbage: Vaguely. Vaguely.

Teresa Woodruff: Yeah. Everybody can relate to that, and basically, cells are put on these flat pieces of plastic, and they are cells that have no relationship to the organs. And all the organs in our body are really connected by these tubes called blood vessels, and it's really fundamentally the flow of nutrients in and the removement of waste in a constant manner, and it's communication between these organs that gives us the ability to function. And we've never been able to make that happen in a petri dish, and so I came back to the lab and told everybody we were going to try and connect all these organs together, and everybody kind of looked at me, and it was a bunch of graduate students, and I think the first thing, they kind of looked at each other and then they looked at me and said, "Well, okay."

We didn't really know what we were doing. We were really building the boat as we were sailing out of the harbor. So we got that grant right when Kelly was coming into the laboratory, and we partnered with a technology company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we had to go back and forth with them. We said, "Well, here's what we would expect if this system were working," and then they would build something and it wouldn't quite work, and so then we'd go back and iterate back and forth, and it really was a great marriage between a huge technology company, a company that actually builds most of the parts to the shuttle system, so they're a true engineering company, and our group, which was really an expert in the reproductive system.

And so, it became a wonderful long-term project, about a five year project to get to one paper, which is now recognized by Discover magazine this year as one of the top discoveries of the year.

Al Cubbage: Great.

Teresa Woodruff: And nobody's been able to ever keep organs alive for 28 days in culture, so this is, as Kelly said, an ovary, fallopian tube, uterus, cervix, and a liver. So, five organs communicating across a 28-day reproductive cycle. Just a really profound outcome.

Al Cubbage: And I think we've got a video that explains this a little bit, too, don't we?

Teresa Woodruff: Yeah, I think we do.

Al Cubbage: If we can get that to work. Let's see if we can pull that one up, it's a very good explanation.

[VIDEO BEGINS]

Joanna Burdette: Avatar being a virtual representation of a human being, and in this case, it's a biological representation of the female reproductive tract, so we call it Evatar.

Hunter Rogers: Potentially, yes, but then it kind of [crosstalk 00:13:43]

Teresa Woodruff: The system that we've invented, together with Draper Laboratories, is a series of interconnecting cubes that have individual tubes that now connect each of the organs.

Hunter Rogers: So, we would have actual samples from an ... We would have, like, a mouse ovary cultured on one of these trans [inaudible 00:14:01].

Teresa Woodruff: The fluid can dynamically flow between all of these individual different compartments, just like each of our organs do, as if blood was carrying factors between different organs.

This would be the ovary, so it's coming from here, going into here, and then flowing ... It's a little miniature ovary, so we actually have either the individual follicles from the ovary, and a follicle in the ovary are the cells that make the hormones, like estrogen and progesterone, together with the [inaudible 00:14:28], or we can actually have the entire ovary there, and that allows us to control the hormones over a 28-day menstrual cycle in a box.

Ji-Yong J Kim: Understanding how the uterus responds to hormones is really important. There is no animal model for a lot of the stuff that we study, and so the human is really the perfect model to study the human endometrium, the uterus, and the diseases that are associated with it.

Joanna Burdette: We were able to actually acquire primary human tissue from women who were having surgeries for different menstrual or reproductive related problems.

Teresa Woodruff: This is the first time we've been able to model the entire reproductive hormone profile, and that profile of menstrual cycle hormones now allows us to connect those dynamic hormones to downstream tissues, like the fallopian tube, uterus, cervix, together with a liver. And that integration now will allow us to understand better about the reproductive tract itself, which we don't have good models for, as well as reproductive diseases.

So now, this is going to allow us to test drugs for individuals. We'll be able to eventually make individual organs from each person, so we'll be able to do personalized medicine. It's really going to open a whole new world of reproductive health testing.

[VIDEO ENDS]

Al Cubbage: Kelly, tell us a little bit about your role in this. I'm curious how you played on this one.

Kelly McKinnon: As Teresa mentioned, when I first joined the Woodruff Lab, this was already in progress and I was just fascinated with it. I wanted to get involved with it, and Teresa told me basically, "Pick any cell that you want to study in the female reproductive tract, and make a name for it." At the time, they weren't including the ectocervix, and after all my research, I was like, "Well, the ectocervix is really important. It should be in there, too." And Teresa gave me the freedom to do that.

One of the things I noticed, when we were looking back through that video, is you can see all of the other professors that were involved; Dr. Kim, Dr. Burdette, and we would also have weekly meetings with Dr. Hope, who's an expert in immunology, and he studies AIDS, and a number of other people would come to our meetings. So, just my first experience in graduate school, I had feedback from all of these different professors from different departments, from different institutions. I think that really made a difference in what we were able to accomplish. So yeah, I brought the cervix in and was able to recruit someone to help me with that. Also, in the picture that you're seeing now, I trained several students who also helped me with the cervix part of that.

Teresa Woodruff: Yeah, master's students and undergraduate students are part of the team, and equally represented as our faculty. So, that was a really big collective of students.

Al Cubbage: Yeah, and I guess that's a question that struck me, is that it seemed like to a great extent, science and other disciplines as well, very much requires someone to be collaborative. You know? That you need to be the kind of classic thing of the lone scientist working along in her lab or his lab, is that really a model that works anymore? Or is it much more, you got to play well with others?

Teresa Woodruff: My sense is that teams matter. You can do things alone, but I think you can go further faster when you're working together. It's the concept of the lattice versus the ladder, that you can really hold on tighter. The Evatar is a great example of something that didn't always work, so we had to have the great stability of each other working back and forth and allowing each other to fail at times. Sometimes, really in a pretty dramatic fashion, and then get back on the horse and keep going. So, I think teams help through the struggles.

Teams can also bring different kinds of intuition to the process, especially when you're really inventing something that never existed before. Bringing that little light bulb moment, that can come from anyplace. And I always like to say, I never learn anything sitting in a room talking to myself. I only learn when I'm at lab meeting, and so lab meeting becomes that cauldron into which all kinds of ideas and new data come. And the students are really the first to see the data, to start working with it, but it's only as we all put our eyes on it that we can make discoveries that year after year, are top discoveries of the year. So, I'm very passionate about bringing as many team players to the problems that we're trying to solve.

Al Cubbage: I know another part of that that has certainly been a cause for you is making sure that women are represented as well. Not just in terms of the science, of making sure that the data includes that of women as well, and the research includes women as well, but also the practitioners, the actual people who are doing the research.

Teresa Woodruff: Right. Right.

Al Cubbage: So, talk a little bit about in your mind, why it's important to first of all, have research that includes the data from both men and women, and then why in the lab is it important to have both men and women?

Teresa Woodruff: Well, the data has to include male and female cells because I think that represents the biology of all of us. As you indicated, Al, I've been very passionate about this since basically the time I was a post-doc in the early 90s. Really wondering why, in fact, we were limiting the data that was being acquired on those very drugs that were life preserving or life extending for all of us, but are only being tested on half the population.

So, that has become something that I've been very passionate about, and over the last 20 or so years, have worked to try and make the arguments, basically to anybody who'll listen, that we must include sex as a biological variable in animal studies and the cell-based studies. By about 2014, we had about 82% of all of science was published using male cells or animals, or didn't actually describe the sex of the animal.

My sense is that that's not in the best interest of the science, and that's not in the best interest of all of us, in whose interest that science is being done. And so, through a series of papers and talks and advocacy and trying to be the authoritative voice on why this matters, we were able to get a policy change through the NIH that finally was enacted on January 25th, 2016. That was a milestone that we celebrated here at Northwestern and each year, on January 25th, we have a wonderful celebration. This year, the city of Chicago and Rahm Emanuel proclaimed it the city of Chicago's Women's Health Research Day, and it was also federally designated as a National Women's Health Research Day. Unfortunately, the government shut down, so we'll wait for next year for that to be formalized, but our Congresswomen Schakowsky and Senator Duckworth were really great at putting that through, and it was bipartisan support for that, which I think may be one of the biggest things we've done this year, is to get bipartisan support for anything in the Congress.

What that really means is that from January 25th, 2016 on, all of science changes. And I tell all my graduate students, "This is the best time to be in science." Because it's as if we've now just purchased the Louisiana territory, and you've got all this intellectual land to now go out and learn more about science and health, and how our body actually works. It's a very exciting time to be at the position that Kelly is, which is basically finishing up her PhD, now launching into about a two year period called a postdoctoral fellowship where she'll develop additional professional skills to then go on and join us in the academy. So, for folks like Kelly, this is really a most exciting time.

Al Cubbage: And I had a couple questions from our listeners that were essentially along that line. I guess one of them is, one, how do you make sure that the universities and really the country encourage women to engage in science, in research? And then two, what's the best way to spread the word about that? Public high schools? Outreach things? I mean, how do you evangelize that?

Teresa Woodruff: Well, I'm an evangelist on this, and Kelly's joined me on this as well, so she'll have her own statement as well. But the biggest thing that we could do is to have young men and women leave high school saying two things: "I like math. I like science." If we could get that kind of transformation across the city of Chicago, we would change the world. That's what we're working for.

Kelly has joined be in a series of summer outreach programs, one of called the Oncofertility Saturday Academy, or summer academy, and we've had numerous of these programs throughout the years. We've also templated that program in several other cities around the United States, and the real goal is to have largely young women come into our lab and learn why physics matters. Why does chemistry matter? And really connect the dots for them between the physics that they're learning, or the chemistry that they're learning, and the zinc spark, which they can trigger on their own in the laboratory. Or putting them in with our engineering graduate students, with Emma Gargus and with Hunter Rogers, two graduate students that are inventing these very new technologies and can now talk to them about how the engineering principles allowed us to make something that basically functions very similarly to our body; something that never could've been invented before.

I really want to change that equation of leaving high school saying, "I don't like math or science." I don't think that the young women have to become me. They don't have to become Kelly. They don't have to become a scientist or a doctor. But if you leave high school saying, "I like science and math," you have a better awareness of the data in the world around you. You have a better awareness of how to integrate the kind of information that comes at us in just an incredibly fast pace. And so, that's one of the things that I've been working on, and Kelly has taken this on in many ways, including through science communication.

Al Cubbage: And Kelly, I guess this is a question again from one of the listeners, but I think it's a good one for you. Come back to you on it too, Teresa, is; one, what drew you into it? And two, what advice would you give to a high school girl who is considering a path in science? I mean, how do you get into it, and what would prompt you to do it, and then what's the best way to approach it?

Kelly McKinnon: Well, I came from kind of a different background. I didn't do my undergraduate at a research university. I had to go find those opportunities on my own, and so when I was an undergraduate, I would try to help women get into that, that were maybe a small liberal arts college, and how they could find research at other opportunities.

But I also think it's important just for us to be out in the public. We forget that most Americans have never actually met a scientist, and they don't realize that—

Al Cubbage: They're good people.

... this is what a scientist looks like, and that you can be one, too. So, we try to get out in the public. We went to the March For Science. We did a Women's Health Research Day that they're showing here, just to go out and talk to people about women's health and about science, and the kind of research that's going on in their neighborhood, to try to get them interested and see that they can do it, too.

Teresa Woodruff: And you even went to DC. You were in the science communication program in DC.

Kelly McKinnon: Right, I also went to DC because I think something that, as scientists, we all need to be paying attention to more than we do, is policy. So I went to learn how scientists can get more involved, and what kind of jobs PhDs are doing in academia. I really learned a lot about how we, as scientists, can actually affect policy. So I was able to bring that back to some of the—

Teresa Woodruff: Graduate

Kelly McKinnon: ... graduate students here.

Al Cubbage: Good. Good, and Teresa, how about you? What prompted you to go into this field, and what ... I mean, in terms of specifically, again, one of the questions our listeners asked is, why the passion on oncofertility? What made you go that way?

Teresa Woodruff: Oh, yeah. So …

Al Cubbage: I mean, first, in general, what brought you to science? And then what brought you to that specific thing?

Teresa Woodruff: Well, like Kelly, I came to science in a circuitous way. I started out wanting to be a first grade teacher. My mother was a first grade teacher, and my grandmother was a teacher of all grades on the panhandle of Oklahoma during the great Dust Bowl. So, when I went to college, a small liberal arts college with no research, I also wanted to be a first grade teacher, going into elementary education. It was there that I really loved the chemistry that I was doing, and my professor said, "Well, would you like to do research? And would you like to do it at Caltech?" And I said, "What's Caltech? What's research?" And basically, that was the starting point.

So, at the summer of 1984, which was the Olympic summer, I went to Los Angeles and was able to have this enormously mind-opening experience of this thing you call science. Going again from that horizontal book where the answer's in the back to this thing of trying to ask the questions that can be tomorrow's new knowledge. So, I came to Northwestern as a graduate student, and began working with Kelly Mayo, a great scientist here, and then went to Genentech, where I was working as a postdoctoral fellow when they were doing these great new drugs, but were only testing in males.

And so, that was an awakening moment, but it wasn't the ... I didn't start doing a lot of advocacy or passionate work on it at that time. When I came to Northwestern and then to pivot back to the oncofertility, I came back as a faculty member in 1995, and Steve Rosen, who was the director of our basic science, the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at the time, tapped me to be the director for a basic science program. I was a reproductive scientist, not a cancer person, so I think he liked my administrative skills. So maybe that hearkened toward the dean eventually.

But it was there that I became aware that there was a boy that was coming down from our children's hospital to the main hospital to bank sperm, and I thought, "Well, that's just great." And then I said, "Well, what do we do for the women?" And they said, "Well, nobody needs to really worry about that. They need to really focus on surviving the disease." And that again was this awakening that simply said that, well, the young women with the same hope for surviving their disease as the young men need to have the opportunity for preserving their fertility in an even more timely manner, in many ways. Once that gonad is destroyed for the female, there's no possibility of restoration.

And so, that started the initial work to think about how my own research could in fact enable a reproductive future for young female cancer patients. I started in the early 2000s, and by about 2007, it wasn't just the research that I was doing that was a paper to a grant to a paper and then back again. It was something that needed to be a medical field, and I had called it originally the Center for Families after Cancer, and one of the great things about Northwestern is you can call anything anything you want as long as you don't need money.

So, I started this thing called the Center for Families after Cancer, and called all my friends from around the university. Really, literally people from all of our schools. Dorothy Roberts, who was a law scholar, and Laurie Zoloth, who was religion and ethics, and Lindsay Chase-Lansdale and family, and started to get together with them to say, "Well, what could we imagine doing?" Laurie Zoloth said, "Well, you have to do something, and then after you do it, I'll shake my finger at you." She was our great ethicist.

Al Cubbage: Right, right.

Teresa Woodruff: In fact, she ended up working with us on this program, and today, oncofertility is a true medical discipline. Two months ago, we had the first two states in the United States provide full insurance for young women with a cancer diagnosis. So really, in 10 short years, we've taken something that nobody would think about for women, and have transformed it into a medical discipline, where most women will now have some sort of fertility preservation option, even in the cancer setting.

Al Cubbage: One of the questions, again, that a listener sent in, but I was curious too, is that, how important is it that you as a woman took this on? Is this a project that would've been done, had there not been a woman scientist who really took ownership of it?

Teresa Woodruff: You know, I'm a big fan of women, so ...

Al Cubbage: I am, too. I would like to point that out.

Teresa Woodruff: I think the academy is best when it is most diverse, and at a minimum, that means that males and females should be equally represented in our faculty, in our students, in our undergraduate population, in those people who are making decisions about where we make investments, and what we do to inform the next generation of learning, or of health. So, I do think it matters that you have women who are asking the questions, and then enabled to solve the problems.

I suspect that there are a lot of people who looked at these things and said, "Hm, well, isn't that too bad?" And I think the key for me is the passion to take that next step and do something about it, and I hope that's what I've instilled in my students, is the gumption to go and do it, to look at things and say, "Hey, that's not quite right," and then to go find the team to actually solve the problems. You have to do all the hard work. You have to be very credible and authoritative. You have to write the grants a couple times, sometimes. You have to struggle through failures, particularly if it's a technology that doesn't match what you think it should.

But in the end, if you have that vision, you can have that long view and just take one step at a time. You can look back and say, "Northwestern changed things. Because of Northwestern science, we have a field of medicine for young cancer patients. Because of Northwestern, women are ..." I always cry. Doesn't play well on radio, but we have, for the first time, the opportunity to have sex as a biological variable, meaning that medicine isn't just made for men. That we are part of the equation. Women came into the academy only in the ’80s, and in the sciences, we're much more rare than we should be. So it's in ensuring that people like Kelly continue to persist and to move forward, and that's a real passion area for me.

Al Cubbage: And that was something, actually, that we just got a question from a listener on, is ... You may not know the answer. I realize this may be a question for our research vice president, but do you have any sense for what percentage of research money is allocated for reproductive health, particularly women's reproductive health? How has that changed in the past five, 10 years?

Teresa Woodruff: Yeah, at the federal level, it's very low. Women's reproductive health is part of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, either the least funded or the second least funded of the institutes. And so, my sense is that this is a place ... Northwestern has courageously worked on reproductive health for about 30 years. Neena Schwartz started the Center for Reproductive Science in the late ’80s. Kelly Mayo took it on, and now I'm the director of the Center for Reproductive Science.

Part of it gets all wound up in people's concern about the word sex. What we're really talking about is reproductive health, and in fact, we have a fantastic website called the Reprotopia, which is a central site for reproductive health information from K to gray. So, for five year olds, we have coloring books. The anatomy, the very physiology of our anatomy, is something that people need to understand. And because we think about sex ed rather than ... and about having sex or not having sex, at the earliest stages of kids' development, we've left out of the equation the very real and necessary information about anatomical health. About menstrual cycle health, about transitions through puberty. So, we actually have on the Reprotopia coloring books for kids.

For the eight to 12 year olds, Ellen Wartella and I, who's a great faculty member here in the School of Communication, developed a series of videos called “The New You, That's Who.” These are little jingles, and I'll tell you, if you listen to them online, it'll get stuck in your head, so I'm just warning you, Al, right now, that the puberty one, you're just going to love. But the idea is, just as we all learned how a bill became a law from "Conjunction, junction, what's your function?", what we want to do is bring reproductive health to both the kids and to the moms and dads. And in fact, Ellen tested these videos with parents and kids, and they all learned more than any other video they had tested in an educational space. Eric Patrick, who was also a faculty at Northwestern, animated it with a group of students, and it's—

Al Cubbage: Yeah, I saw them. They're fun.

Teresa Woodruff: ... just fantastic. And then we go to a MOOC. We developed a MOOC for college students, freshmen and sophomore. We only have something like 22 states out of all 50 who require any kind of sex ed, and again, remember, I want to talk about reproductive health. You get to college and you don't have any information, so these MOOCs are really fast-paced videos that Harlan Wallach and I worked on together to make sure that entering college students know something about their own reproductive health.

20% of young women and 5% of young men are going to have some reproductive health problem or concern during their college years, yet they might not even know it, and this will mean that on average, some will not persist because of health issues. And I want to make sure that people can understand that, and understand the signs early enough, and just understand something about themselves that they couldn't in any other format.

And then we have other materials there, but Northwestern is a place where reproductive health has always been valued, and we've been able to invest in it, and I think it's something that is unique. There is not another place around the country that has the kind of investment in fundamental science, and especially that which has been transformative, not just from the bench to a paper and back again, but really literally to the patients who need this lifesaving research.

Al Cubbage: Great. Great. And Kelly, when you're doing your communications and your outreach kind of thing, what kind of reception do you get? I'm curious, as you're spreading the word.

Kelly McKinnon: When I'm just interacting with the general public, everyone is super excited to talk about it. They're really happy that we're out. I know at the last event, there were women that came up to me, and we had a lot of different stuff out at the event. We had oncofertility material, we had Center for Reproductive Science, just random women's research, and she shared with me that she had personally been a cancer survivor and had had reproductive issues, and she never knew that any of this existed. It was just really touching to hear her story, and that she never knew that any of these options were ever available. So, I think they're really just glad to have someone out there talking to them about it, which they haven't had before.

Al Cubbage: Great. Good. Good, good. Teresa, I know we've covered a lot of topics, but I think we've only got about five or eight minutes left, so tell me what I've forgotten to ask. What are the other things, both on the science side of things, but also in graduate education. I mean, again, I think one of the strengths of Northwestern is the fact that we are really good at undergraduate education, at professional degree education, law and business, medicine obviously, but also our graduate school. I mean, we get some of the best students from around the world.

Teresa Woodruff: We really do. We have 13,500 students pursuing advanced degrees at Northwestern, and they're just a great group of people who really are passionate about a whole variety of different topics, from music ed all the way to the sciences, and back again. My goal is to really make what people are doing visible, viable, and valuable. The visibility is to make sure that every time I'm talking, there's a graduate student somewhere around, and you could see in some of the movies, and certainly with Kelly, we want to highlight what the graduate students are doing, and their innovation, their contribution to the science, or to the creativity, or to the next generation of knowledge that all of them are doing. To make that work more valuable by ensuring that we are able to bring it to the public, so that people can understand what is being done to remove jargon, to make sure that we have social media in a way that people can understand what our folks are doing.

And then viable. Just making sure that they are ready, with all the tools necessary to succeed down the line. Our students out-compete in many ways all our competitors, and I've been looking at some of the outcomes data from humanities and social science and science, and our students go on to great next jobs that are really having an impact, and I'm so proud of what we do at Northwestern. I'm delighted to be in this new role, to help in some way be part of the foundation on which students like Kelly and others springboard to their next career.

Al Cubbage: Yeah, one of the things that I've certainly noticed in my years in that graduate education is kind of a combination of discover and disseminate. Some places do one well, and some places don't do the other, but I would have to say honestly, it seems to me that Northwestern does it both.

Teresa Woodruff: Yeah.

Al Cubbage: We're doing really interesting research, and fortunately, most of the students who come out of here tend to do a pretty good job being able to disseminate that information.

Teresa Woodruff: Yeah, absolutely. And they go on to great positions in the world, and as you indicated, we have a great international population, and we have students, because of the interdisciplinary nature of the science that we do, and just who is at Northwestern, our students get to mix a great deal across wide disciplinary differences. My students in the oncofertility world can work with ethicists or social scientists or law scholars, or sit on an ecumenical council to understand how religion informs decision-making that's happening within oncofertility, for example.

So, it represents a unique place in academia that I think is the reason that we still have so many applicants to Northwestern, and those who come are those who are best enabled and ready to change the world that we all live in. I really believe in that transformational equation; that tomorrow's patient will be better than today, and we ourselves will be better than we were yesterday.

Al Cubbage: Great. Great. The question I've been wanting to ask for 40 minutes now ...

Teresa Woodruff: Uh oh. Kelly, you can take this one.

Al Cubbage: Right. Well, I guess it's true for graduate students as well. Do you sleep at all?

Kelly McKinnon: That's a question I've always wanted to ask Teresa, too, so ...

Al Cubbage: A busy life.

Teresa Woodruff: It's a busy life, but you know, when vocation and avocation meet, I think that means that we're doing what we love, and I think ... I sleep, and everyone sleeps, and we are all happy about what we do, and we're passionate about what we do.

Al Cubbage: Great, great. Well, I think that pretty much brings us to the close. I need to do a couple concluding remarks, but obviously the first thing I need to do is thank you both for a terrific interview. It was interesting and enlightening. Personally, it's really good. So …

Kelly McKinnon: Thank you for having us.

Al Cubbage: ... let me say that it's just great to have you with us, and I think that this is the sort of thing that the NULC Insider Series really is proud to put on, to have a couple of people who can explain things as well as you.

Our next Insider Series will take place I think in May. I understand that we're still sort of pulling things together a little bit. Ah, here we go. This just in. Next session is May 17, thank you. Appreciate that. So, watch your email, NULC members. Watch your email for an invitation. We certainly hope that you'll plan to join us.

There are recordings of previous NULC Insider sessions available online at wewill.northwestern.edu/nulcinsider. Again, you can go to the web and hear some previous ones as well. And after today's session, we'll email you a survey, and we'd appreciate your feedback or response so we can make the future NULC Insider Series even better. Kelly, Teresa, thanks to you again, and thanks to all you NULC members for supporting Northwestern. Have a great afternoon.