Leaving a Legacy

Building Women’s Health Research at Yale to improve the lives of women and advance our knowledge of human health has been a privilege and a great joy in my life. It has allowed me to meet and work with many wonderful people – at Yale, across the nation, and within the extraordinary community here at home. As I leave the center, I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the success of Women’s Health Research at Yale and share this reflection of what we have accomplished together.

During the 1990s, recognition of the information gaps on the health of women was increasing along with the realization that women in our nation were more likely to suffer chronic and debilitating disorders. As was said then, living longer does not mean living better, and serious change was required in how science was conducted to respond to the need for data on women’s health. It also became clear that this change had to be forged through a coordinated and dedicated effort.

The capacity for us to initiate a galvanized effort for change came in 1998 with a $6.5 million grant from the Patrick and Catherine Weldon Donaghue Foundation and the support of Yale School of Medicine. I was honored to receive this grant after much productive discussion and written descriptions of the importance of this investment, the way in which funds would be allocated, and how the results would serve the community. This iterative process resulted in five strategic initiatives.

Our first strategic initiative at the start of 1998 was to begin generating data on women’s health. We did this by offering Yale investigators competitive Pilot Project grants that would yield the feasibility data necessary to obtain larger grants from external sources. It was not possible to obtain such grants without preliminary data demonstrating the value of a proposed study and, at that time, there were little to no such data on women.

Our Pilot Project Program has produced data for immediate implementation ranging from use in the treatment of autism spectrum disorder in girls to cancers that uniquely affect women. It also has generated new external grants worth twenty times the several million dollars we invested in the pilot studies – and this leverage of funds has resulted in valuable data uncovering sex differences in the development of Alzheimer’s disease to identifying sex differences in metabolic problems that underlie disease.

The second strategic initiative was to engage researchers from different disciplines because studying the health of women had to be integrated into all fields of medicine. From the beginning and over our 27 years, we encouraged researchers to work together – as interdisciplinary teams – to ask and answer complex yet pressing questions about how to improve women’s health. This type of work is now mainstream as science graduated from studying health in specific organs to organ systems throughout the body to now increasingly studying the whole person.

Partnering with the community has been our third strategic initiative. It was Raymond Andrews, trustee of the Donaghue Foundation, who pointed out to me that our research and findings should be actively shared with the community. In this process, we would learn from the community and have the opportunity to describe the practical benefits of our work. Perhaps hard to believe now, but this was a relatively new idea at the time. And so, from the beginning, thanks to his foresight and encouragement, one of the goals of the center was to have a meaningful relationship with the community to exchange information and learn from each other. In this context, our Advisory Council was formed from many different communities and has been an invaluable resource.

As these initiatives got underway, it was not long before a fourth strategic initiative was started. Namely, we began training the next generation of physicians and scientists about the importance of studying women and embedding data-driven information on sex differences into clinical practice. This rewarding experience of teaching and mentoring junior faculty, medical students, as well as graduate and undergraduate students, is helping to ensure the future of women’s health research.

As this historical context might suggest, there is one more important strategic initiative that we have actively pursued over the years. It is to help develop public policies ensuring that the health of women as well as men is included in how we approach and fund scientific research. It has been gratifying to be part of these efforts over many years, in ways ranging from providing testimony to Congress to giving presentations across the nation and globally, to my more recent work in the White House. I truly appreciate all these opportunities to participate in creating systemic changes that advance everyone’s health and will remain committed to this effort.

This closing column captures only a small part of what we have done together and my gratitude to everyone for being a part of this important work. I wish the new director of Women’s Health Research at Yale all the best, and I believe that women’s health will continue to advance. We have shown that purposeful health research, policy, and action can improve women’s health and lives, and, as that happens, families do better and our nation can thrive.

Carolyn M. Mazure, Ph.D.
Norma Weinberg Spungen and Joan Lebson Bildner Professor in Women’s Health Research Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology
Director, Women’s Health Research at Yale
Yale University School of Medicine