Monday, April 25, 2022   |   12:00-1:00pm   |   Virtual   |   Registration Required

View Recording Here

Domino Hypothesis vs. Parallel Symptomatic Outcomes: Investigating Commonly Co-occurring Symptoms of Menopause-related Vasomotor, Sleep and Mood Disturbance

Hadine Joffe, MD, MSc

Executive Director, Mary Horrigan Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology

Paula A. Johnson Professor of Psychiatry in the Field of Women’s Health

Executive Vice Chair for Academic and Faculty Affairs, Department of Psychiatry

Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Joffe is the Paula A. Johnson Professor of Psychiatry in the Field of Women’s Health at Harvard Medical School and the Executive Director of the Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology as well as the Executive Vice Chair for Academic and Faculty Affairs in the Department of Psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she founded and directs the Women’s Hormones and Aging Research Program.

As the Director of the Connors Center, she oversees a research program with two main pillars — equity in novel therapeutics and the role of stress on the health of women.  She launched the First.In.Women Precision Medicine Platform to ensure that women benefit equally in the development of novel therapeutics. First.In.Women stimulates medical research and partners across the bioscience ecosystem to advance sex-specific and sex-differentiating knowledge in treating diseases that are exclusive, predominate, or differential in women. To advance stress research, she developed the Women’s Health Interdisciplinary Stress Program of Research (WHISPR) which lay the foundation for the 2020 awarding of the NIH U54 Center grant (Reproductive Outcomes of Stress and Aging) through the SCORE (Specialized Centers of Research Excellence on Sex Differences) mechanism at NIH.

Monday, March 28, 2022   |   12:00-1:00pm   |   Virtual   |   Registration Required

View Recording Here

Neuroendocrine pathways mediating the effects of stress on reproductive function

Presenter:

Ursula Kaiser, MD

Chief, Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Hypertension

George W. Thorn, MD Distinguished Chair in Endocrinology, BWH

Professor of Medicine, HMS

Director of the Brigham Research Institute

Dr. Kaiser has an active research program focused on the genetic and molecular mechanisms underlying the neuroendocrine regulation of puberty and reproduction. Her research has received continuous NIH support for more than twenty-five years.  She also serves as Program Director of the NIH-funded Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) K12 program to train junior faculty in women’s health research, and the Principal Investigator of an NIH T32 training grant to train physicians and scientists in academic endocrinology. Dr. Kaiser is also an active clinician, focusing on neuroendocrinology and reproductive endocrinology.

Dr. Kaiser is a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, and a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She is the recipient of the Ernst Oppenheimer Award and the Sidney H. Ingbar Award of the Endocrine Society and is President-Elect of the Endocrine Society.

Monday, January 24, 2022   |   12:00-1:00pm   |   Virtual   |   Registration Required

View Recording Here

Sex Differences for Skeptics:  How can we Increase our Chances of Identifying True Sex and Gender Differences in Health?

Presenter:

Janet Rich-Edwards, ScD

Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Associate Professor of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Janet Rich-Edwards is the Director of Research for the Division of Women’s Health, Department of Medicine and Director of Lifecourse Epidemiology for the Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology, both at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Her research focuses on varied determinants of women’s reproductive health and chronic disease across the life course

Her talk will address best practices to find and replicate true sex and gender differences that are less vulnerable to the play of chance.