Announcing our 2025 Women’s Health Research Funding Opportunities!

We seek innovative and impactful studies to optimize the health of girls and women, prioritizing studies of those diseases that present the largest burden to women and have the lowest current amounts of research funding in both the public and private sectors. We identified the five areas of study below as our funding priorities for 2025 because they remain huge burdens on the lives of women and girls and are grossly under-funded. 


Adolescent Girls’ Mental Health: There is an exponentially greater prevalence of mental illness in adolescent girls than boys. Until 2016, neuroscientists only looked at the male brain’s response to stress, never examining how stress affects male and female brains differently. More than half of teen girls feel “persistently sad or hopeless”- the highest level reported in a decade - and one in three girls seriously contemplated attempting suicide in the past year.

Uterine Cancer: Uterine cancer is the most common gynecologic cancer and is one of the few cancers that is rising in both incidence and mortality, especially in younger women. Uterine cancer also has one of the greatest racial disparities of any cancer. There are no established screening guidelines for asymptomatic women. Since 1975, the five-year survival rate for uterine cancer has in fact decreased from 87% to 81%.

Autoimmune Disease: 78% of all autoimmune patients are women, and yet the reason for such a high prevalence of this disease among women remains unknown. Answering this question is critical, as autoimmune disease is a leading cause of mortality in young and middle‐aged women, and findings will inform the development of new treatments and therapeutics to save women’s lives. We’re looking for innovative approaches aimed at mechanisms that reduce sex-based differences in autoimmune disease.

Vaccine Uptake in Adolescent Girls and Pregnant Women: The HPV vaccine has the ability to entirely eliminate cervical cancer, and yet vaccine hesitancy is on the rise and grants to study vaccine hesitancy were some of the first cut from the NIH budget this year. The downward trend in general vaccine coverage is alarming, especially for adolescent girls and pregnant women. We see a major erosion in uptake of HPV vaccines in adolescent girls, and flu and RSV vaccines in pregnant women, which will lead to an immediate worsening of health outcomes for women and children.

Cardiovascular Disease: Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, yet women are largely unaware of their risk for heart disease, which is more likely to kill them than all forms of cancer combined. We seek studies investigating the protective mechanisms from cardiovascular disease in pre-menopausal women and indicators of future cardiovascular disease in pregnant women. Women with pregnancy complications such as pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes might have long‐term cardiovascular consequences; and menopause-related hot flashes have been linked to cardiovascular risk factors.

In the News

We regularly link articles we think you'll find edifying in the media section of our website. Here are some we want to highlight this month to give a sense of the scope of the problem we are addressing, the opportunity that lies at our fingertips, and the current climate.