Three-time alum traverses departments to tackle maternal and fetal health
Jingyi Wu came to CMU to study physics, but the supportive community he found inspired him to continue his academic journey at the university for nearly a decade.
When Jingyi Wu first arrived at Carnegie Mellon, he was an eager first-year student set on pursuing a bachelor’s degree in physics. Little did he know that his academic career at CMU would span nearly 10 years and include not one but three degrees.
“I chose to come here for undergrad because I knew that it would be academically challenging,” Wu said. “During my junior year, I started to think about what to do in the future and realized that I wanted to do something that felt more connected to people’s lives. That’s when I found Jana Kainerstorfer’s biophotonics course. It blended physics and biomedical science, which was exactly what I was looking for.”
After receiving his B.S. from the Mellon College of Science (MCS), Wu made the switch to the College of Engineering where he received an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in biomedical engineering under the mentorship of Kainerstorfer, professor of biomedical engineering.
While his time as a CMU student is coming to a close, Wu’s decade-long journey traversed multiple departments, driven by work that required both an interdisciplinary and entrepreneurial approach. His graduate research specifically focused on improving maternal and fetal health during childbirth by developing an algorithm to measure fetal oxygen saturation during labor and delivery.
Using his background in physics to study how light interacts with human tissue, Wu’s research explores the noninvasive use of light to measure how much oxygen a fetus is receiving. Currently, physicians can only measure the fetal heart rate, but Wu says that this single metric falls short in assessing overall fetal health.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are approximately 1.2 million Cesarean deliveries (C-sections) each year, accounting for 32.1 percent of all births in the U.S. Wu is hopeful that his research will reduce this number. Measuring fetal oxygen saturation offers a more complete picture of a fetus’s well-being than heart rate alone, and it can help determine if a fetus is experiencing hypoxia (low oxygen levels)—a common reason for a C-section delivery. With this additional metric, physicians can make better informed decisions about whether surgical intervention is necessary.
Wu worked to develop a novel algorithm to calculate and quantify this measurement of oxygen saturation. The noninvasive technique, transabdominal fetal pulse oximetry, works by shining light through the mother’s abdomen, where it interacts with the fetus before being captured by a detector on the surface. The detected light is subsequently analyzed using Wu’s algorithm to extract fetal oxygen saturation levels.
Wu validated his algorithm through experiments with human free-divers, who held their breath during dives to test the algorithm’s accuracy under low-oxygen conditions. To extend the algorithm’s use to fetal pulse oximetry, Wu incorporated multi-layer photon modeling to account for signal interference from maternal tissue.
“This work lays important groundwork for the clinical translation of transabdominal fetal pulse oximetry, but further validation and development are still needed,” Wu said. “Our contributions also provide tools and insights for broader biomedical optics and physiological monitoring communities.”
Moving forward, Wu is continuing to collaborate with the startup company Raydiant Oximetry to commercialize a device that would be able to perform these measurements. Together, they are working to “more accurately detect fetal distress using noninvasive transabdominal fetal pulse oximetry,” said Neil Ray, Raydiant’s founder and CEO.
Graduate school can be demanding, challenging, and stressful, and Wu’s experience is no exception to this. But the supportive community he found at CMU, Wu said, was crucial to his success. He also credits his undergraduate advisors for helping to steer him toward a research lab that matched his interests.
“It’s a hard five years both physically and mentally,” Wu said. “I’ve learned toward the end of my Ph.D. research work that it’s really important to balance how much time I spend in research, as well as just taking time off to refresh my brain, which would actually make me more productive and even creative during the work.”
Both in and out of the classroom, Wu has found that a feeling of belonging made all the difference in determining the trajectory of his academic journey. From the research lab to his extracurricular activities and sports, the CMU community helped Wu build friendships and collaborations that crossed departmental boundaries.
Of his 10 years spent at CMU, Wu noted that the most fun he had in the lab was getting to collaborate with his best friends from the Machine Learning Department, MCS, and Heinz College on research projects.
“One of my mentors said that the most fun he had during his Ph.D. was collaborating with many other people from different disciplines, so I tried to do the same with my friends in different departments,” Wu said.
With Wu’s physics and engineering background and his friends’ knowledge of machine learning, together they were able to extract cardiac pulsations from optical signals measured using light—a clear example of entrepreneurial and interdisciplinary innovation.
Since arriving at CMU, Wu has co-authored nine peer-reviewed articles and completed an internship at Apple, but he maintains that the most rewarding part of his time in Pittsburgh is the connections he has made and support he received from “the school, departments, professors, and friends.”
While Wu has plans to stay in Pittsburgh as a temporary postdoc through the fall semester, he is looking forward to the next chapter of his career.
“I’m not sure what exactly I’ll do next, but I’m confident in whatever will come,” Wu said. “For me, that’s what is most important.”