ORWH Marks 30th Anniversary with Virtual Meetings

The Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) is hosting 3 virtual meetings to celebrate 30 years of women’s health research and sex and gender studies within and beyond the NIH scientific community. The meetings, ORWH’s 30th Anniversary Virtual Meeting Series: Advancing the Health of Women Through Science, will be held Dec. 14-16 and will convene researchers on the health of women and sex differences as well as members of two signature ORWH programs: Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH, pronounced “birch”) and Specialized Centers of Research Excellence (SCORE) on Sex Differences. 

• BIRCWH annual meeting, Dec. 14, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.—Celebrating its 20th anniversary, BIRCWH is a mentored career-development program connecting junior faculty, known as BIRCWH scholars, to senior faculty with shared interests in women’s health and sex differences research. The annual meeting brings BIRCWH scholars and faculty together to share research and experiences. The 4th Ruth L. Kirschstein Memorial Lectureship will focus on the importance of and improvements made in mentoring young investigators. The plenary session will also include presentations on research findings by leading BIRCWH scholars. A special “Innovation Talk” to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the BIRCWH program will close the session.
• ORWH 30th anniversary scientific symposium, Dec. 15, 9:30 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.—This symposium will feature opening remarks by NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, a keynote address on women’s mental health across the life course and a panel of directors from several NIH institutes and centers discussing their perspectives on women’s health. Additional presentations will discuss high-priority women’s health topics, such as applying the principle of studying sex as a biological variable across scientific disciplines. 
• SCORE annual meeting keynote address, Dec. 16, 10:40-11:30 a.m.—A signature program of ORWH, SCORE is the only NIH cooperative program supporting disease-agnostic research on sex differences. Each center in the SCORE program serves as a national resource for translational research, at multiple levels of analysis, to identify the role of biological sex differences on the health of women. At this year’s SCORE annual meeting, Dr. Jocalyn Clark, executive editor of The Lancet, will present the keynote address “Sex Differences Research and the Health of Women: An Editor’s Perspective.” Note that only the keynote address is open to the public; the remainder of the event is a business meeting of SCORE investigators.

More information is available at https://orwh.od.nih.gov/about/newsroom/events.