US$4.5m renewal backs women’s health careers programme

A five-year, US$4.5m renewal will expand a women’s health careers programme for early-career investigators, strengthening training in sex differences research.

The funding supports the Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) programme at Emory University and comes from the US National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

BIRCWH develops the next wave of investigators studying how diseases affect women and men differently, pairing mentored research with skills in methods, biostatistics and grant writing. The renewal will train nine new scholars and enhance leadership development and administrative capacity in the next cycle.

“ This programme equips emerging investigators with the mentorship and support they need to grow into independent scientists. That foundation helps them turn curiosity into discovery and build careers that advance women’s health.”

The contact principal investigator is Anandi Sheth, director of the division of infectious diseases and professor of medicine. Co-principal investigators include Vas Michopoulos, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences, and Claire Sterk, president emerita and professor at the Rollins School of Public Health.

Since launch, the Emory programme has graduated 16 scholars who have published more than 700 peer-reviewed papers cited over 24,000 times; 11 alumni have secured nearly US$30m in NIH funding. Applications for the next cohort, run in collaboration with the Georgia Clinical & Translational Science Alliance KL2 Scholars Programme, close on 2 Feb 2026.