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 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%.

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.

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.

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.

80% of black women and 70% of white women will develop uterine fibroids by age 50, with black women experiencing more severe symptoms, earlier onset, and higher rates of hospitalization and surgical interventions at a cost of more than $6 billion to the American health care system. Fibroids can cause heavy menstrual bleeding, pelvic pain, anemia, painful intercourse and a subsequent loss of intimacy, and even infertility. There is a pressing need for improvements in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of fibroids, given that the only current treatments for the disease itself are surgical to remove individual growths that may then recur. We seek proposals to develop minimally-invasive or non-invasive treatments for uterine fibroids.