With Feeling: University of Chicago Magazine Profiles STEAMe Co-Founder Stacy Tessler Lindau

This article by Chandler A. Calderon originally appeared as "With feeling" in The University of Chicago Magazine (Fall 2026, Volume 119, Number 1). It is republished on steame.com with permission. © 2026 University of Chicago.

Stacy Tessler Lindau, AM’02, and four medical students, all clad in white coats, walk quickly with two members of Lindau’s lab through University of Chicago Medical Center halls that many patients will never see. The moment has the feel of a medical drama, but the group isn’t rushing to see patients—they’re visiting Feed1st pantry sites.

Lindau founded Feed1st in 2010 to give patients and their families no-questions-asked access to food. Since its beginnings as one pantry site in the Comer Children’s Hospital, Feed1st has grown to 11 locations throughout the hospital complex and distributed 167 tons of food, serving 168,791 people. This is just one of the many community-minded initiatives Lindau, the Catherine Lindsay Dobson Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and professor of medicine-geriatrics and palliative medicine, has headed as a physician, entrepreneur, inventor, and administrator. Now UChicago’s senior associate vice president for research, Lindau leads the Bionic Breast Project, creating an implantable device that is intended to restore sensation following mastectomy. Lindau was recognized for this innovative project in the 2024 Forbes 50 Over 50.

Lindau is busy, to say the least. Today, the medical students and lab members, who manage the day-to-day operations of Feed1st, have only half an hour to take Lindau to as many pantry sites as possible. At each pantry (a table and a shelving unit full of food), the team sanitizes surfaces, reads comment cards, and updates whiteboards with the date of their inspection. The students take turns sharing updates and improvements with Lindau, such as their work with a nutritionist to add recipes to the pantries, and the welcome news that even community members who are not receiving treatment in the hospital have been using the pantries. Lindau then leads the team in brainstorming steps to increase and measure the project’s impact.

At the first stop, in Comer Children’s Hospital, the team decides to start using the whiteboards to let people know they’re responding to feedback. “We read your comments,” Lindau writes on the board at one table, noting that they’ve fulfilled a request for more staples of Mexican cuisine, stocking the pantry with corn, beans, and other key ingredients. She steps back, pauses, and then returns to the board to draw a heart.

“Let’s walk and talk,” says Lindau as they hurry from one pantry to the next. While the group moves through back hallways, in and out of elevators, Lindau pushes the group to think about how they can collect more data on pantry use and encourages the students to nominate staff volunteers for UChicago Medicine awards.

At the last stop on the tour, the team is excited to show Lindau the fully reorganized Feed1st storage room. The new system will improve volunteers’ experience, they say. Lindau, grabbing hold of a teaching opportunity, prompts the medical students to connect this organizational effort to their future health care work. Increasing efficiency, she says, will give them more time to spend caring for patients and will keep their “empathy bucket” full.

The concept of order was at the origin of Feed1st, Lindau goes on to explain. She once noticed how messy a young patient’s hospital room had become, the family understandably forgoing tidiness at such a difficult time. She now makes a point to straighten up patients’ rooms when she checks on them, and she started Feed1st to further reduce the burden on families in UChicago’s hospitals. “You need order to create impact,” she tells the group.

“I’m an opportunistic teacher,” Lindau later reflects, sitting in her sun-filled corner office along the Midway. The walls are full of documents, art, diplomas—everything neatly framed. These rounds, she says, are a chance for her to offer her students “pearls,” drawing connections between what they’re seeing in the clinical setting to their future lives as doctors.

Lindau’s own path to medicine wasn’t straightforward. “People look at my career trajectory and could maybe think I’m like a pinball bouncing from here to there, but I’ve stayed very true to what my passion and interests were from the beginning”—interests, broadly speaking, in how human relationships affect the health of democracy and in how societal relationships affect the health of people.

In college Lindau studied political science and secondary education, hoping to become a high school social studies teacher. She moved to New York City and, finding limited teaching positions, ended up working at The Wall Street Journal in broadcast journalism—a job that reinforced her undergraduate love of research and writing. Around this time she started volunteering at a hospital, which in turn led to her decision to study medicine. Along the way she got an opportunity to delve into research, pursuing a master’s degree at the Harris School of Public Policy. There she combined her training in political science with her desire to understand the systemic drivers of health.

Growing up in suburban Detroit, Lindau developed an early interest in the roots of inequality and a desire to fight racism. “My parents said, ‘Your job is to make the world better than how you found it,’” she recalls. This mandate “just became part of me.”

Lindau decided to pursue gynecology because it allowed her to work with patients in every phase of life. Today both her research and her clinical practice focus on understanding how social and sexual factors drive health, especially for cancer patients and survivors.

Since many women with cancer have a cancer that affects reproductive organs, loss of sexual function is common before, during, and after treatment. Lindau works with patients to prevent, mitigate, and treat these negative side effects.

She’s always thinking about how to increase impact beyond the clinic. “Science scales,” Lindau says. “I can treat people fairly in the one-to-one encounter, but science is what enables me to drive fairness at greater scale.”

That effort has propelled Lindau through a series of community-focused research and entrepreneurial ventures over nearly two decades. Through CommunityRx, which she founded and directs, Lindau studies the impact of low-lift public health interventions that connect people to community resources supporting basic material needs or helping with grief, disease management, or end-of-life care. In collaboration with University Trustee and Medical Center Trustee Rachel D. Kohler, MBA’89, she founded MAPSCorps to engage young people as data scientists in their communities and NowPow, a platform that connects patients with local community services. They also cofounded STEAMe, a software company that connects employers and candidates and provides data-driven insights about the workforce.

In all these ventures, she says, “the underlying drive is fairness.”

As she’s tried to make a difference, she’s been called naive plenty of times. “I’m not, I don’t think, naively optimistic, but I do wake up every day with the feeling of like, ‘OK, back at it, keep trying,’” she says. There’s another thing that helps her juggle her numerous responsibilities: “I walk really fast,” she says with a smile.

In her medical practice, too, she’s had to be determined, working continuously to have women’s sexual health taken seriously. Over the years, she’s seen progress.

“I have done a lot of work myself,” Lindau says. “I had to train myself on how to diagnose and treat sexual dysfunction. It wasn’t part of my training as a resident. We don’t have fellowship or subspecialty training in OB-GYN for this domain yet.” She’s enshrined this specialty at UChicago Medicine through the Program in Integrative Sexual Medicine (PRISM) for Women and Girls with Cancer, which she founded and directs. In 2010 she was founding chairperson of the Scientific Network on Female Sexual Health and Cancer, brings together physicians, researchers, and health care workers around the country to study and treat sexual health concerns in women and girls with cancer.

Over the years she’s tried to learn from patients what matters most to them, and she’s created public resources to build awareness and to support those she may not meet in the clinic. She established WomanLab—an online hub with videos, lists of questions, and other resources—to empower patients and practitioners in talking about sexual health in conversations around aging, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other issues.

It was a conversation with a patient that brought Lindau to the bionic breast. The patient said that while her breast reconstruction following mastectomy was healing well as far as her surgeon was concerned, her scars and numbness were a major interference in her sexual life.

“She literally pointed her finger in my face and looked me in the eye and said, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ And she picked the right person to say that to,” Lindau says.

In the United States alone, more than 100,000 women have mastectomies each year. As a result of this surgery, which involves cutting nerves that supply sensation from just below the breast all the way up to the collarbone and under the arm, as many as 60 percent of patients experience persistent numbness, and many also experience chronic itching or pain. Most reconstructive surgeries focus only on aesthetics.

Lindau’s desire for justice was sparked: “Is it fair that we perform a procedure—mastectomy—on 100,000 women a year in our country alone and have put all kinds of resources in restoring the appearance of people’s breasts but not restoring the basic function of people’s breasts? No, that’s not fair. I would argue it’s not a good allocation of resources,” she says.

Beyond lactation—breasts’ only function as far as medical textbooks are concerned—breasts play crucial roles in intimacy, spatial awareness, and one’s sense of identity. Lindau hoped to fill what she saw as a clear gap in treatment by designing an implantable device that would restore sensation and mitigate pain.

A member of her lab came across Sliman Bensmaia’s research on restoring sensation for people with spinal cord injuries and integrating the sense of touch into prosthetic limbs. Bensmaia, the late James and Karen Frank Family Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at UChicago, had made headlines after a patient he worked with fist-bumped then-President Barack Obama using a prosthetic arm—and felt it. Lindau reached out to see if the same technology could help restore breast sensation, and she and Bensmaia got the project off the ground in 2016.

Soon after, they brought on Sihong Wang, associate professor of molecular engineering in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, to develop a sensor. All three were excited by the potential scale of impact the bionic breast could have.

But in 2023, just days after they received a major grant to further develop the device through early clinical trials, Bensmaia died unexpectedly. The tragedy left Lindau stunned. “After I could feel something,” she says, she became even more determined to see the project through. “‘This has to go on,’” she remembers thinking. “He left a very important legacy to the project,” she says of Bensmaia. “He left relationships, people who cared enough about him that they’re willing to continue to work with me by proxy.”

One of these researchers was Charles Greenspon, assistant professor of neurological surgery, who took over Bensmaia’s role in managing the nervous system portion of the project; another was Emily Graczyk and her team at Case Western Reserve University, who developed the nerve interface used in the bionic breast.

The interdisciplinary collaboration has required the team to figure out how to work across divergent norms. “We come from very different disciplines, and these disciplines are literally like different cultures,” says Lindau. But as Greenspon says, they’re united by a clear mission: “Our goal is just to have people have better quality of life.”

They found that not everyone was as convinced as they were of the need for this work. On a proposal for federal funding, a peer reviewer commented, “It’s not clear how important sensation is to patients after mastectomy.”

“This critique touched a nerve (no pun intended),” write Lindau et al. in the study they published in response. It’s true that it can be challenging to demonstrate the function of breasts beyond lactation. Lindau and her team needed the help of patients to articulate how significant the loss of sensation was for them.

Through interviews with mastectomy patients and other sources, the study hammers home some crucial functions of breasts and gives poignant examples of how disruptive persistent numbness, itching, and pain can be. One woman described dropping a newspaper she carried under her arm because she couldn’t feel it; another couldn’t tell when the front of her shirt was unbuttoned or when she got the front of her torso wet while washing up.

“I don’t want it to be touched,” said one respondent. “Every time I hug someone, I’m reminded of the breast cancer.”

If these personal stories weren’t convincing enough, at the conclusion of the paper, Lindau and her coauthors suggest to skeptics a quick way to check their bias: “Simply replace the word ‘women’ with ‘men’ and ‘breast’ with ‘penis,’ as in: ‘It’s not clear how important penis sensation is to men after penectomy.’ The ridiculousness of this statement is eminently obvious and an alert to skeptics to reconsider the fairness of their clinical and scientific judgment.”

“Physical interaction between each other, physical interaction with environments is one of the main ways that we as humans, as a living species, are interacting with the world, receiving information,” says Wang. The whole body is engaged in this work. In this sense, he says, “you cannot say a certain part of the body is not important.”

With the bionic breast, they hope to restore these crucial functions. The science behind the nerve interface portion is quite simple, says Greenspon: Nerves are stimulated by electric jolts. With the interface they are using, an ultrasmall cuff containing electrodes wraps around a nerve ending. Different electrodes can be activated to stimulate different parts of the nerve, creating a nuanced experience of sensation. This kind of interface has been used before—for example, with prosthetic limbs—and Greenspon is confident that it will work here. The priority now is rigorously proving the device’s safety for long-term implantation and determining the optimal placement around the chest. Greenspon anticipates that working with surgeons to adapt their practices will also pose a challenge.

The sensor is a different story. What Wang’s team is engineering will be the first of its kind: a flexible, hypersensitive device that can be implanted for the long term. Existing implantable sensors are rigid and have been used only temporarily. Though soft sensors do exist, they are more commonly used in applications like robotics.

The ultimate goal is to have the sensor sit under the skin along the entire breast. To get there, Wang had four main challenges: The sensor had to sense pressure much as the breast does; be “soft as skin,” he says; waterproof; and biocompatible, meaning it won’t trigger an immune response when it’s implanted in the body.

He’s working on a design with a powerful conductor housed within squishy, waterproof layers. At this point, the sensor is sensitive enough that it can even pick up a feather falling on it. “It’s already below the pressure sensing threshold of a fingertip,” says Wang.

In July Wang was excited to share a new result with the other members of the Bionic Breast Project team. His lab had just shown that the sensor performed well in a biofluid-like environment, retaining its sensitivity for several weeks. This positive evidence makes Wang confident that they will soon be able to begin testing the sensor in mice, getting ever closer to human trials. He’s looking ahead to the broader applications such a sensor could have in monitoring and diagnosing conditions like cardiovascular disease. “This collaboration is one of the most valuable things that can really turn the research into real impact,” says Wang.

There is still a long road ahead for the bionic breast, but the team continues to see encouraging progress. The nerve interface portion of the device began clinical trials this past spring. Lindau is assisted in this work by Summer Hanson, associate professor of surgery; Nora Jaskowiak, professor of surgery; and Sarah Shubeck, assistant professor of surgery, who recruit patients and implant the device. In April the second patient in this trial—which involved a temporary implantation of the nerve interface—experienced sensation.

Lindau hopes the project will pave the way for similar collaborations. “The way we created this team for Bionic Breast, that same kind of team put around a whole bunch of other problems would be super catalytic,” she says. “I’m hoping that our work is an exemplar to inspire how other people might think about solving problems, all the way from the molecular to the totally translational, with doctors and patients in between.”

As the Feed1st team stood in the organization’s storage room, Lindau had told her medical students that all her work comes down to “restoring something basic to decrease numbness.” The physical numbness of the body, a numbness that comes with exhaustion or grief, or even the numbness that a doctor might experience when faced with problems that don’t yet seem to have a solution.

In her office, Lindau stands up, efficiently packs her bag. She has only a few minutes to get across the street to the provost’s office for her next meeting. As colleagues emerge from their offices for lunch, she walks briskly down the hall and out of sight.