He’s making pregnancy sonograms more accessible
Dr. Jeffrey Stringer merged an artificial intelligence app with a portable ultrasound device to improve maternal and child health.
When Dr. Jeffrey Stringer was in the middle of his medical program at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in the mid-1990s and distraught at the death of a patient, his chief resident led him away from the deathbed to another part of the hospital: the nursery.
“It was a circle of life moment,” Stringer says. “It was so renewing to see new life. And I decided I’d rather be on that side of medicine.”
He’s now an OB-GYN and the Clarke-Pearson Distinguished Professor at the UNC School of Medicine, where he also leads the Global Women’s Health division. This group of more than 150 clinicians, researchers and public health practitioners are actively addressing global women’s health issues, including birth outcomes, contraception and HIV prevention.
In May, Stringer received the 2025 Oliver Max Gardner Award from the UNC System for his work on maternal healthcare in low-resource settings around the world.
A global health advocate
That work began in 2001, when Stringer and his family moved to Lusaka, Zambia, where he collaborated with the government to implement a pilot project focused on mother-to-child HIV transmission. Eventually, it became the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia, a nongovernmental health organization focused on improving health care access through research and public health programs.
As CIDRZ expanded, Stringer saw fewer patients and spent more time being the organization’s CEO — managing staff, forming partnerships and writing grants. What was intended to be a one-year research project in Zambia stretched into 11 years for Stringer. By 2012, CIDRZ employed over 700 people and brought in over $30 million per year in funding for research, training and clinical work.
At CIDRZ, Stringer uncovered a major barrier to care for pregnant women: access to ultrasounds. The machines were too expensive, there weren’t enough trained sonographers to do the scans, and there were even fewer radiologists to interpret them.
This stayed with Stringer as he returned to the U.S. in 2012, when UNC-Chapel Hill recruited him and 30 of his team members to create the Global Women’s Health division.
“We came here because of the excellent global health program, school of public health and OB-GYN department,” he shares. “We felt like it would be a place where we could really thrive.”
A tech innovator
Stringer, specifically, is interested in capturing better obstetric ultrasounds. These exams enable health care providers to determine how far along a pregnancy is, assess whether the baby is developing properly and identify any potential risks.
He and his team are developing a portable ultrasound device that plugs into a phone or tablet and uses artificial intelligence to interpret the scans captured. This reduces the need for a large, high-end ultrasound machine, which can cost $40,000, or more and trained sonographers and radiologists. These resources can be hard to come by in many places around the world, including rural parts of the U.S. Nearly 65% of people in North Carolina, for example, live in areas lacking access to primary care physicians, so this technology could make a big difference for small clinics.
In collaboration with the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, they are implementing the app in public sector sites in Zambia to see how it works. Stringer hopes to get FDA approval for the device by the end of 2025. While his focus has been on global health settings, he now sees how beneficial it could be across rural regions in the U.S.
“My lifelong goal is to build something that’s going to improve health care for women around the world,” he says. “I think this technology could be transformative.”
