As an NC State College of Engineering student, Margaret (Meg) Stokes Alden ‘02 knew she wanted to do something that would help people — but it took her a while to decide if she’d be able to make a greater impact in medicine or in engineering.
Part of the first graduating class of the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University (BME), Alden was leaning toward engineering during her sophomore year. But by her final semester of college, she decided on medical school.
By 2019, she was able to bring together both as a full-time pediatrician and an entrepreneur. She is the chief medical officer of Momtech, Inc., a startup that specializes in replicating the biomechanical properties of nursing. The company’s main product is mōmi, a bottle nipple that mimics the natural nursing properties of breastfeeding to reduce feeding confusion.
“As a student, I wasn’t sure that the work I could do as an engineer would be as close to the impact as I wanted to be, so that helped me decide to go into medicine, where I was one-on-one with the patient,” Alden said. “Now I feel like because I’ve had this opportunity in medicine, I can come back to my engineering … and feel like I’m having an impact on a larger scale. It’s very full circle.”
The first BME class
When Alden was in high school, she attended an engineering camp at NC State and stayed in Wood Hall, learning about different engineering disciplines. Her mother, Margaret Allred Williams, was one of the first women to graduate from NC State with a degree in computer science.
“She graduated in the 70s and had all kinds of great stories about the punch card labs that were in the basement of Nelson Hall,” she said. “She started showing her true red and white once I was there.”
Alden started at NC State as a biological engineering student, and finished with degrees in both biological engineering and biomedical engineering. She and her roommate were often among just a few other women in their engineering classes, and she remembers her mother advised her from her own experiences to keep her head down, go to office hours and not get distracted. Her senior year, she and two female classmates won the BME senior design competition.
During her years at NC State, she was close with her BME classmates as they navigated being the first students to go through the program. “Everyone went in very different directions from my class,” she said.
After graduation, she spent one year working at Olive Garden and as a bank teller at BB&T in Raleigh, North Carolina, while studying for the MCAT and completing her medical school requirements. She then enrolled at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and has lived in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, ever since.
“I originally thought I was going to do orthopedics with my engineering background, but I just really fell in love with pediatrics,” she said. “There’s a lot of math and engineering, which is sort of a geeky reason to love it. But it’s very different medicine because it really depends on the size of the child and there’s a lot of special consideration to be made based on how big they are.”
Embracing entrepreneurship
After finishing a five-year tenure in a leadership role at her practice, Alden wanted to do something different. She spoke with one of the eventual co-founders of Momtech, who told her he’d be in touch if he came across something that fit her expertise. A week later, he came to her with the idea for mōmi.
The mōmi nipple mimics the function of the natural nipple: it is soft and stretchy, and it has a single duct that babies can compress with their tongue to regulate the flow, rather than having to cover the opening with their tongue on other types of bottles.
It is with a deep amount of gratitude that I want to give back.
“The majority of moms have to incorporate breast and bottle feeding together when they are feeding their baby. Introducing a bottle can be a stressful process as there is often a risk of choking, nipple confusion and even nursing strikes, when the baby will not go back to breastfeeding,” Alden explained. “The mōmi bottle will not disrupt breastfeeding. It allows the baby to be fed and allows the mom to settle into her nursing journey and for them to meet back together without having a disruption.”
Managing her full-time role as a pediatrician and as a CMO requires blocking time and multitasking. But she is excited for next steps. Momtech plans to release a breast pump soon.
Giving back and supporting women
Last year, Alden signed NC State Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s Founders’ Pledge, which demonstrates a commitment to giving back to the University in the future.
“I credit a lot of what I have achieved and hope to achieve to the education I got at NC State, the people I met while I was there and also the foundation that it gave my mother,” she said. “It is with a deep amount of gratitude that I want to give back.”
Having benefited from scholarships, Alden is a proponent of improving access to education and of women working together in engineering and entrepreneurship.
“It can be a very daunting field, but also extremely rewarding,” she said. “And I would encourage women to network amongst themselves and with their peers, and to be unafraid to look less than 100 percent and be willing to accept help from professors and from each other — with the goal of bringing more women along in these fields.”
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