Roccabianca named director of Center for Women’s Health Engineering
Sara Roccabianca will lead the interdisciplinary center advancing novel approaches to women’s health
Sara Roccabianca, associate professor of mechanical engineering & materials science, has been named director of the Center for Women’s Health Engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis effective Aug. 1, 2025.
Roccabianca joined McKelvey Engineering as an associate professor in August 2024 from Michigan State University, where she had been on the faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering since 2014, most recently as associate professor. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
“The focus of Sara’s research and her experience with interdisciplinary teams make her an ideal leader for the Center for Women’s Health Engineering,” said Aaron F. Bobick, dean and James McKelvey Professor. “Sara’s vision for the center’s next phase will advance its work at the forefront of women’s health research and innovation."
The Center for Women’s Health Engineering brings together investigators from the McKelvey School of Engineering and the School of Medicine to collaborate in research, education and training at undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels. The center supports interdisciplinary research and outreach both within and outside of the university community and focuses on some of the more understudied and underfunded areas of women’s health, including maternal health and cancers of the reproductive system, from both the engineering and medical research perspectives.
Roccabianca plans to convene an advisory committee to enhance strategic planning for the center.
“I am excited about the opportunity to contribute to the ongoing success of the center,” she said. “I will continue to host the annual research symposium and plan to create awards for trainees who are doing great work in this space.”
Roccabianca's expertise lies in the biomechanics of the urinary tract and cardiovascular systems. Her research seeks to advance the understanding of healthy tissue properties, elucidate changes occurring in response to injury and disease and provide guidelines for improved treatment and intervention strategies. Her work has led to several discoveries, such as the importance of cell-extracellular matrix mechanical interaction in myocardium modeling, the mechanical contribution of perivascular adipose tissue to vascular mechanics, and the impact of extracellular matrix remodeling on urinary bladder mechanics in conditions like radiation cystitis and neurogenic bladder due to spinal cord injury.
Roccabianca steps into this role following a one-year period led by interim director Quing Zhu, the Edwin H. Murty Professor of Engineering, one of the original founders of the center. Zhu successfully led a collaboration grant program in 2025 and supported a summer research experience program. Zhu will return to her research activities, leading multidisciplinary teams in developing imaging technology to diagnose cancers of the colon, cervix, ovaries, uterus and breast.
