Jennifer Brace

Work life: Jennifer Brace has spent 18 years with Ford Motor Company working in diverse areas of the company. Her path started in engineering and then took several unexpected turns which lead to marketing, user research, mobility innovation and her current role as a global trends and futuring manager. Some highlights from her career include developing and launching the interface for SYNC and her time in Silicon Valley seeing Greenfield Labs go from 15 employees to over 350. Jennifer holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering and a MS in Engineering Management from the University of Michigan. Personal life: I'm married with a beautiful son Max, 2.5yrs. My husband and I spend a lot of time and energy keeping Max engaged and healthy. He's got a rare bone marrow disorder and it requires regular blood transfusions plus an eventual bone marrow transplant. I spend a lot of time learning about his condition and how I can help.

In 2019 I became a mother. I had no idea of how impactful the experience would be for me and my husband. Our son was born with a rare disorder called Diamond Blackfan Anemia. He looks acts and develops like a normal kid but his body simply doesn't make red blood cells, technically he makes a small amount but its not enough to keep him healthy. The treatment for this is regular blood transfusions, he gets a transfusion every 3 weeks and has since birth. In order to cure him of this, he will need a bone marrow transplant. Something parents never want to hear. Upon learning this I did a lot of research to learn about his options and found that having a sibling match as his marrow donor was preferred. So I decided I to work towards finding a sibling match. As luck would have it, science has come a long way and using IVF and pre-genetic screening tests specially developed for our family enable us to test embryos to see if they might match Max. Typically 1 in 4 is a match. For the last year and half I have been going through egg retrievals and testing in hopes of getting that match. I've learned so much about the IVF process and feel like there's a lot of room for improvement. While the field has advanced, it still feels like doctors have no answers or reasons behind anything that happens. My questions are always answered with, every woman is different or we just don't know. Anyhow, after 4 egg retrievals, 14 embryos tested, we had one maybe which could have matched my son. In October we transferred that embryo, I was pregnant for a week and then it just stopped. No reasons why, just didn't work. My husband and I were devastated but we continue to push forward and will transfer another embryo knowing it won't be a match for Max. Recently we learned that donor bone marrow leads to the same long term success rates as siblings, this was new data released on his disorder. Our doctors advised us to take the IVF sibling match stress off our plates as Max has 70 matches in the donor database. 70. That's a promising number. We are still in the middle of this journey but it will undoubtedly continue to have profound impacts on the way we live, learn, care and love one another. I'm not sure where this passion will lead just yet but I am honored to be the one to guide my amazing son through it.

Connecting, Engineering, Futuring, human centered design, Inclusion, IVF, Mobility, Technology, user reserach