Impact of Increasing Funding for Research on Women’s Health
New York State Perinatal Association (NYSPA)
July 23, 2026 Lunch and Learn
Sex differences extending to the cellular level impact everything from disease pathways to treatment efficacy. Pervasive knowledge gaps in women’s health and sex differences create an opportunity to accelerate and transform health science to improve diagnostic accuracy, optimize therapeutics, and refine prevention and treatment strategies to improve health and healthcare for women and men.
Dr. Bird will talk about a vision for quantifying and visualizing the evidence base on women’s health to identify gaps and the opportunities they represent for rigorous, high impact research on the health of women.
Speaker
Chloe E. Bird, Ph.D., FAAAS, FAAHB
Chloe E. Bird, Ph.D., is a sociologist and Director of the Center for Research on Women’s Health, Sex Differences, and Population Health at Tufts Medical Center. She is the Sara Murray Jordan Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine and a Senior Sociologist at RAND.
Dr. Bird’s research—funded by NIH, PCORI, and WHAM—focuses on structural factors that influence women’s health, ranging from how research priorities are set to access to maternal healthcare. Her current work builds on her book Gender and Health: The Effects of Constrained Choice and Social Policies, which presents a model linking social and biological factors to show how families, workplaces, communities, and policies shape men’s and women’s opportunities to live healthy lives.
She served on the National Academies of Science committee reviewing NIH’s funding of women’s health research and as a senior advisor in the NIH Office for Research on Women’s Health. A recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Career Award, Dr. Bird is a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Health Behavior. She is committed to translating research into institutional and policy changes that advance science on human health and promote men’s and women’s health.