Connors Center for Women's Health Research at Brigham and Women's Hospital

02/20/2025

The MGH Harvard Center for Reproductive Medicine is hosting its 4th Annual Reproductive Medicine Symposium virtually on February 25th from 4pm to 6:30pm. This year's theme is “Innovation in Women’s Health and Gender Biology” and the keynote speaker will be Corrine Welt, MD, Chief of the Division of Endocrinology & Metabolism, School of Medicine, University of Utah. Learn more and register to attend here:

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02/12/2025

The Brigham and Women's Department of Medicine is hosting its 13th Annual Grand Rounds event honoring VDay this Friday, February 14th from 12pm-1pm in person in the Marshall A. Wolf Conference Center and virtually via Zoom. The event will be a panel conversation on Intimate Partner Violence in the context of OpenNotes. Learn more below:

02/07/2025

We are excited to share an update on the progress our 2024 Gayle Brinkenhoff IGNITE Awardee, Aditi Hazra, PhD, MPH has made on her IGNITE-funded research. Dr. Hazra studies Ductal Carcinoma in situ (DCIS), a form of breast cancer that starts and stays in the milk-ducts and often has worse outcomes in young women and women of color. With her INCLUDE (IN situ Carcinoma - LobUlar and Ductal - and Equity Study) Study, Dr. Hazra is working to improve DCIS outcomes in these understudied groups through community engagement and AI research. To achieve this, her team has partnered with AfroPink, Inc., a non profit that increases breast cancer awareness in the African-American community and whose founder is pictured below with Dr. Hazra, and local community leaders in the Haitian American community and the Pink and Black Boston Advocacy group. With the help of these partnerships, Dr. Hazra’s team is planning the work of collecting tissue samples from Black women and other underrepresented groups that can be used, with the help of AI, to create an algorithm that better predicts DCIS outcomes. We’re thrilled to see Dr. Hazra’s important work progress and look forward to more exciting developments!

02/05/2025

Connors Center Executive Director Hadine Joffe, MD, MSc and Scientific Advisor JoAnn Manson, MD, DrPH, MACP were interviewed for an article in Boston Magazine that spotlighted the exciting menopause breakthroughs that have happened recently in Boston. Read the article here:

Four breakthroughs that happened here are fueling a midlife revolution.

02/03/2025

The Connors Center-Division of Sleep Medicine Joint Sleep Grand Rounds will be taking place on Monday, March 3rd from 12-1pm in the Bornstein Amphitheater and online via Zoom. Speaker Thomas A. Mellman, MD will discuss "Sleep Health and Urban Stress in Young Adult African American Men and Women". Learn more and register here: https://connorscenter.bwh.harvard.edu/3-3-25-connors-division-of-sleep-medicine-joint-sleep-grand-rounds/

02/03/2025

The Connors Center is hosting its 8th Annual Women’s Health Interdisciplinary Stress Program of Research (WHISPR) Symposium on Tuesday, April 2nd from 3:30-5pm in the Marshall Wolf Conference Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and online via Zoom. It will feature Keynote Speaker Alfonso Abizaid, PhD who will discuss “Bridging the gap: The metabolic stress response to social stress in females”. Learn more and register to attend here: https://connorscenter.bwh.harvard.edu/8th-whispr-symposium/

01/30/2025

Check out this recent article from McKinsey about the importance- both scientifically and economically- of considering s*x-based differences throughout the pharmaceutical development process: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/closing-the-womens-health-gap-biopharmas-untapped-opportunity

The Connors Center has long advocated for the inclusion and specific investigation of women in the development and utilization of new drugs, devices and digital therapeutics in order to produce s*x-specific and s*x-differentiating knowledge about newly developed treatments. Through our First.In.Women® Precision Medicine Platform, we work to encourage exactly what this report outlines: the intentional and systematic inclusion of data related to women so that we can fully understand how s*x and gender influence disease. Further, our FiW® team completed a national survey on women’s participation in clinical trials and is actively developing a community-based education and skill-building program to empower Spanish-speaking Hispanic/Latina women to become community research advocates. We look forward to sharing more about these exciting new initiatives as they progress!

Read more about FiW here: https://connorscenter.bwh.harvard.edu/first-in-women/

First.In.Women® Precision Medicine Platform (FiW) is a translational research platform that advances the inclusion and specific investigation of women in the development and utilization of new drugs, devices and digital therapeutics in order to produce s*x-specific and s*x-differentiating knowledge...

01/22/2025

We are excited to announce that our 2024 Annual Report is now available to read on our website! 2024 was an eventful year for the Connors Center and we are so grateful to everyone that has helped us continue the critical work of translating novel and existing s*x- and gender scientific findings into new s*x- and gender-informed treatments, policy changes, and clinical innovations. Read the report here: https://connorscenter.bwh.harvard.edu/annual-reports/

12/12/2024

Yesterday, December 11th, the Connors Center Executive Director, Hadine Joffe, MD MSc was invited to attend the first-ever White House Conference on Women’s Health Research. The conference brought together women’s health researchers, business leaders, advocates and others to discuss progress since the historic Executive Order that President Biden signed in March 2024 to reaffirm his commitment to Women’s Health Research. President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden both delivered remarks at the conference that took place in the East Room of the White House.

During her remarks, Dr. Biden celebrated the progress that has been made in the past year but noted that “today isn’t the finish line; it’s the starting point. We — all of us, we have built the momentum. Now it’s up to us to make it unstoppable.” She also encouraged attendees to join her as she continues her work outside of the White House by being “the researcher who makes sure that each proposal you work on considers women from the beginning … the investor who searches for the next breakthrough product or treatment … the voice in every space, from boardrooms to classrooms to laboratories, who asks, “What are we doing to advance women’s health?”

10/24/2024

We’re excited to share that a study led by Maria Angela Franceschini, PhD in collaboration with Connors Center Executive Director Hadine Joffe, MD MSc and Connors Member Shadab Rahman, PhD has been selected by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) as an awardee of the ! 🎉 They will receive $3.29 million in funding through the initiative’s spark track for early-stage research.

The study, titled Near-Infrared Glymphatic Health Tracker (NIGHT), aims to address a critical need in women's health by enabling effortless monitoring of the glymphatic system (GS) function at home with a wireless NIRS-EEG device during naturalistic sleep. Women face a substantially higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), yet existing methods for assessing GS function are limited and impractical. By offering a non-invasive, cost-effective solution tailored for home use, the GS-FlexNIRS-EEG device could provide valuable insights into GS dysfunction in women, potentially leading to early detection and personalized interventions to mitigate their heightened risk of neurodegenerative disorders like AD.

The ARPA-H is addressing critical unmet challenges in women’s health, championing transformative innovations, and tackling health conditions that uniquely or disproportionately affect women.

Read MGB’s Announcement to learn more: https://www.massgeneralbrigham.org/en/about/newsroom/press-releases/mass-general-brigham-selected-as-sprint-for-womens-health-awardee

06/18/2024

This month's ROSA SCORE CEC Seminar takes place from 12-1pm on Wednesday, June 26th. The seminar's speaker will be Roberta Diaz Brinton, PhD. Dr. Brinton is the Director of the Center for Innovation in Brain Science at the University of Arizona Health Sciences and Professor of Pharmacology and Neurology, College of Medicine, University of Arizona. She will discuss "Women and Alzheimer’s Disease Risk Begins in Midlife During the Menopausal Transition: Implications for Prevention and Treatment".

Register here: https://partners.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_T19uLMTvSSOv0JeBrpI1_Q #/registration

04/16/2024

Earlier today, Governor Maura T. Healey, Secretary of Economic Development Yvonne Hao, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kate Walsh and other state officials visited BWH and toured areas of the hospital, learned more about the work of the Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology and spoke with researchers who have submitted grant proposals to the ARPA-H.

Following the tour, Governor Healey held a press conference to announce $2.8 Million in life sciences funding to improve women’s health outcomes.

Watch the press conference here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BOFk_HTagE

Read the press release here: https://www.mass.gov/news/healey-driscoll-administration-announces-28-million-in-life-sciences-funding-to-improve-womens-health-outcomes