The future of family planning: can technology help?

CAMBRIDGE FESTIVAL 2022

Cambridge Reproduction and the Cambridge University Femtech Society are delighted to present a cross-disciplinary webinar on the latest technologies which aim to revolutionise contraception and family planning. Our panel will unpick gaps in existing contraception and fertility technologies and present the opportunities for new products and services. The panellists will also discuss the challenges and risks of innovation.

Our panel is:

• Dr Lucy van de Wiel (Lecturer in Global Health and Social Medicine, Kings College London)
• Dr Caroline Rusterholz (Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in History, University of Cambridge)
• Rob Milnes (CEO of viO HealthTech)
• Frederik Petursson Madsen (CEO of OUI)

The event will be online.

This event has been organised jointly by Cambridge Reproduction and the Cambridge Femtech Society.

About the speakers

Rob Milnes

viO HealthTech is a global digital health company with bases in the UK and US that offers solutions for the complete women’s health journey. Launched in 2016, the OvuSense family of fertility monitoring products predict and confirm ovulation to help women conceive more rapidly, screen for common issues associated with struggling to conceive and help women and their doctors to monitor treatments. Rob Milnes has been guiding viO HealthTech as CEO for the last 14 years, he has over 30 years experience in bringing ground-breaking medical technology to global markets, with the past 24 years focussed on women’s health. Rob will tell us how their products are helping put women in control of their fertility and their broader vision for managing women’s health in the future.

Lucy van de Wiel

Lucy van de Wiel is a Lecturer and Director of Postgraduate Research in Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London. She is also a work package coordinator in the Wellcome-funded collaborative research project Changing Infertilities, which is based at the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc), University of Cambridge. She is the author of Freezing Fertility (NYU Press, 2020) and featured in the documentary Freezing Fertility (VPRO Backlight, 2021).

Frederik Petursson Madsen

Frederik is co-founder and CEO of Cirqle Biomedical that develops OUI. OUI is a completely new approach to contraception that works by topically engineering the cervical mucus to provide effective contraception with minimal side-effects.

Caroline Rusterholz

Caroline Rusterholz is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Faculty of History and a College Research Associate at St John’s College. Her research project supported by the Wellcome Trust 'Youth, gender and teenage sexual counselling in Britain: The making of the Brook Advisory Centre, 1964-2000' uses the history of Brook Advisory Centres (BAC) as a case study through which to reassess the history of teenage sexuality and of the anxieties it caused in postwar Britain. She is the author of Women’s Medicine: Sex, Family Planning and British Female Doctors in Transnational Perspective 1920-70 (Manchester University Press, 2020).