Who we are
The Foundation for Women’s Health is a lean and efficient grant-making organization. All Board members serve pro bono so that your funds can go directly to the research we need.
Board of Directors
Katy Brodsky Falco
Founder and Executive Director
Katy Brodsky Falco has built and managed non-profit research organizations for leading academic institutions for the past decade. She was most recently the Executive Director of NYU School of Law's Criminal Justice Lab, which leverages data, analytics, an interdisciplinary expertise to build a safer and more equitable criminal justice system. Prior to this, she worked as Executive Director of Crime Lab New York, a criminal justice research organization that partners with civic and community leaders to identify, test, and help scale the programs and policies with the greatest potential to improve lives. She was a staff attorney at Legal Aid Society in the criminal defense division, and Director of Advocacy and Associate General Counsel for Grameen America, Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus’ non-profit microfinance organization. Katy attended Harvard University for her BA and NYU School of Law for her JD.
After surviving both HELLP syndrome and breast cancer, Katy was shocked to learn about the inequities in rigorous research of women’s health. Seeing how clearly the level of funding for research of specific illnesses affected the subsequent health outcomes for patients, Katy sought to apply her experience in managing research organizations, where she identified gaps in the academic literature to test and scale effective solutions, to this new field of study to achieve more equitable results for women.
Dr. Orli Etingin
Medical Director
Dr. Orli Etingin is the Lisa and Sanford B. Ehrenkranz Professor of Clinical Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. She served as Vice Chairman of the Department of Medicine at NewYork Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center from 1997-2009. She is the founder and Medical Director of the Iris Cantor Women's Health Center, a multidisciplinary group practice sponsored by the Departments of Dermatology, Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Radiology, Surgery, and Urology. Dr. Etingin received her undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University and her medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. She completed her residency training in Internal Medicine, subspecialty training in Hematology-Oncology and her Chief Residency at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. Dr. Etingin received an NIH Clinical Investigator Award from 1987 until 1992, during which time she conducted laboratory research on thrombosis in vascular cells. Dr. Etingin is a member of the American Medical Women's Association and the American Medical Association. She is the editor of two nationally distributed newsletters, Women's Health Advisor and Food & Fitness Advisor, and a contributor to Everyday Health.
Sabrina Mallick
Treasurer
Sabrina is a managing member of Sunset Ventures where she currently serves as an advisor, strategist, and operating partner for consumer brands. She is also an angel investor; some investments include Smartypants (acquired by Unilever), Citizen, Knix, Kroma and most recently Ceremonia. Prior to Sunset, she spent the previous decade building mass market consumer brands in food, beverage and beauty while serving as President and CEO at Pure Growth Ventures. Prior to Prue Growth, Sabrina worked at Credit Suisse and Citigroup focusing on due diligence, underwriting, institutional fundraising and capital markets. Originally from Texas, she now lives in Brooklyn with her three sons and husband. She received her BA from Princeton University.
Medical Advisory Board
Dr. Phyllis August
Dr. August is a Professor of Medicine in Obstetrics and Gynecology and Professor of Public Health at Weill Cornell in New York. Dr. August graduated from Harvard College and Yale Medical School and completed her internship at Yale. She received a Masters in Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health. She is the Director of the Weill Cornell Hypertension Center and is the Program Director for the Nephrology Fellowship at New York Presbyterian-Cornell Campus. She is the Theresa Lang Director of the Lang Center for Research and Education at NewYork-Presbyterian/Queens. Dr. August’s research has focused on blood pressure regulation in pregnancy, hypertension in pregnancy, hypertension associated with kidney disease, and kidney disease associated with pregnancy. Her clinical practice at Weill Cornell is largely devoted to hypertension, kidney disease, and obstetric hypertension and kidney disorders.
Dr. Gayatri Devi
Dr. Devi is a nationally recognized expert in the diagnosis and management of cognitive disorders related to menopause and aging. She is Founder and Director of Park Avenue Neurology, a premier center dedicated to neurologic wellness, education, and research in New York City. She is a Clinical Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Zucker School of Medicine and an Attending Physician at Lenox Hill Hospital. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Columbia University and a Clinical Associate Professor of Neurology at NYU. A frequent presenter at national and international conferences, her current research focus is on neuro-modulation in treating stroke, dementia, and chronic pain. Her spectrum approach to dementia was featured in the New England Journal of Medicine. An author of seminal books about brain health, including “Spectrum of Hope,” “A Calm Brain,” and “Estrogen, Memory and Menopause,” Dr. Devi has been featured in various media including the BBC, CBS, the New York Times, NPR, TIME, and the Wall Street Journal.
Dr. Marlena Fejzo
Dr. Fejzo is a faculty researcher in the Center for Genetic Epidemiology (CGE) at the University of Southern California. She has published papers on her genetic studies of many diseases of women including ovarian cancer, breast cancer, and multiple sclerosis, and she discovered the first gene involved in uterine fibroids and the first genes linked to nausea and vomiting of pregnancy and Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG). She started to research HG after becoming bedridden during her pregnancy in 1999 and unable to eat for 10 weeks, ultimately losing a baby at 15 weeks gestation to the disease. Ultimately, Dr. Fejzo hopes her studies will drive development of new and better therapies that target the cause of diseases of women, not just the symptoms, and limit the associated maternal and fetal suffering. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the HER Foundation, which promotes awareness, support and research of Hyperemesis, and was voted 2023’s Fiercest Woman in Life Sciences.
Dr. Sara Hurvitz
Dr. Hurvitz is a medical oncologist and clinical research leader who is senior vice president of the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutch and head of the Division of Hematology and Oncology at the University of Washington Department of Medicine. A graduate of the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, Hurvitz is an international expert in breast oncology and a leader in clinical and laboratory-based oncology research, with extensive experience leading clinical trials in all phases. Dr. Hurvitz works to boost the national reputation of the solid tumor clinical research program and oversees the continued growth of clinical research programs in stem cell transplantation and cell therapy, hematologic cancers and nonmalignant hematology. Dr. Hurvitz has contributed extensively to the growth of clinical research programs since joining the University of California, Los Angeles as a resident in 1999. She is a member of the American College of Physicians, the American Society of Hematology, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, American Association for Cancer Research, the European Society of Medical Oncology and the American College of Physicians.
Dr. Kimberly D. Narain
Dr. Narain is an Assistant Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research at UCLA and a primary care physician in the Iris Cantor UCLA Women’s Health Center. Her research seeks to illuminate the health equity implications of social, economic and health policy interventions among women, racial/ethnic minorities, and individuals with low socio-economic status. She has examined the impact of Welfare Reform and Earned Income Tax Credit laws on the health outcomes of single mothers and conducted one of the few studies to explore the differential impact of state-level minimum wage laws across race/ethnicity and gender. Furthermore, she conducted one of the first studies to explore the relationship between work structure and risk factors for cardiovascular disease among women. Dr. Narain received dual B.S. degrees in Microbiology and African-American studies from UCLA and an M.D. from Morehouse School of Medicine. She completed her residency in Primary Care Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, after which she completed a California Endowment Minority Health Policy Fellowship at Harvard Medical School. After leaving Harvard, she completed a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar Fellowship and earned a PhD in Health Services from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
Dr. Sallie Permar
Dr. Permar is an eminent physician-scientist who focuses on the treatment and prevention of neonatal viral infections. She serves as Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine and Pediatrician-in-Chief at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital, where she helps to expand access to equitable, quality primary and subspecialty care for pediatric patients throughout New York City. She is also the Nancy C. Paduano Professor in Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine and Professor of Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis at the Weill Cornell Graduate School. A prominent physician-scientist in pediatrics, Dr. Permar’s research focuses on the treatment and prevention of viral infections in newborns. She and her team are working on the development of vaccines to prevent mother-to-child transmission of viruses such as HIV, Zika and cytomegalovirus (CMV)—the most common congenital infection and a leading cause of birth defects, affecting roughly one in 150 newborns. She discovered in her research a protein in breast milk that neutralizes HIV, and developed a non-human primate model for congenital CMV infection, now being used to test CMV vaccine strategies.
Dr. Janet Pregler
Dr. Pregler is the Iris Cantor Endowed Professor in Women's Health at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Pregler has directed the Iris Cantor-UCLA Women's Health Center since 1997. The UCLA Iris Cantor-UCLA Women's Health Center Executive Advisory Board Pilot Research Program, in collaboration with the UCLA Clinical Translational Science Institute, has funded pilot research in women's health and sex and gender based medicine for 20 years. Dr. Pregler's clinical interests include menopause and primary care of the breast cancer survivor. She has developed educational programs on women’s health for the American College of Physicians, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and the Department of Health and Human Services, Office on Women’s Health. In 2017, she was recognized as “Woman of the Year” in the health category by the Los Angeles County Commission for Women for her work developing health education programs collaborating with community experts for medically underserved communities, focusing on women's health and environmental toxins, financial literacy, and lesbian, bisexual and queer women's health.
Dr. Judy Regensteiner
Dr. Regensteiner is the co-founder and director of the Ludeman Family Center for Women’s Health Research, and Distinguished Professor of Medicine in the Divisions of Internal Medicine and Cardiology at the University of Colorado Anschultz Medical Campus. Her research expertise is in the cardiovascular effects of diabetes—with a specific focus on women with type 2 diabetes, seeing as they appear to have more significant cardiovascular abnormalities than men with diabetes. Her lab has been funded for over 30 years, and she has authored more than 180 research publications that have influenced the field. She served on the Advisory Committee for the NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health, is an alumna of the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine Program, and is on the steering committee of the National Leaders in Women’s Health group.
Dr. Larissa Rodriguez
Dr. Rodriguez is Chair of the Department of Urology, Professor of Urology and Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Director of the Division of Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery/Urogynecology at Weill Cornell Medicine. She has a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from MIT and completed her medical training and Urology residency at Stanford University and completed her fellowship at UCLA. Dr. Rodriguez’s clinical research focuses on outcomes of vaginal and robotic surgery, quality of life, and health disparities as it relates to pelvic floor disorders, and the pathophysiology and treatment of interstitial cystitis. In the laboratory she is pursuing investigations on the role of environmental stress in the development and maintenance of urinary symptoms, voiding dysfunction and bladder pain. She is an expert in the care of women with pelvic floor disorders including urinary incontinence and voiding dysfunction, pelvic organ prolapse, urinary fistulas and genitourinary tract reconstruction. She has been voted a Southern California Super Doctor, and was the recipient of multiple research awards from the American Urological Association, the Western Section of the AUA, and the Society of Urodynamics, Female Pelvic Medicine, and Urogenital Reconstruction (SUFU). She was also the recipient of the Zimskind Award, an award given by SUFU to an individual with significant contribution to the field of Pelvic Medicine and Voiding Dysfunction within the first 10 years of their career.