Duke student part of new Brawny women's campaign
DURHAM, North Carolina (WTVD) -- By now you might know the Brawny paper towel company plans to swap out their Brawny man for a woman, but what you might not know is that one of the four women picked to represent their new campaign is a Duke University senior, working to save women's lives.
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Picture a beautiful day on the Duke campus, but instead of soaking in the scenery, Brittany Wenger is hard at work on her computer trying to change the way doctors diagnose breast cancer.
She's spent years researching, coding, and creating her Cloud4Cancer app.
She says it has the potential to diagnose 99 percent of breast cancer cases correctly and do much more to help patients.
"So currently it's less invasive, quicker, and cheaper than other alternatives for biopsies for women," Wenger said.
It works by looking for patterns across multiple factors in cell samples, extracted by a syringe, in ways that would take the human mind too much time to compute.
In fact, it's why she won first place at the Google Science Fair in 2012 and she's been working to perfect it ever since - and it's that dedication to STEM that attracted Brawny to her for the campaign.
"It was really nice to break down stereotypes about what people think the modern coder does look like," Wenger said in a promotional video for Brawny's "Strength has no gender campaign."
And changing the face of what strength looks like is what the new campaign is all about.
"I think that for me 'strength has no gender' was just another way to kind of get more women interested in computer science," Wenger said.
Her hope is that hospitals around the world will use her program to help people fighting breast cancer, and that the same technology can also be re-imagined to help others seeking diagnosis for other illnesses as well.
