Dr. Goldstein was a panelist for the Forum’s discussion on Drug Trials and Heart and Brain Disease in Women.
Jill M. Goldstein, Ph.D. is a Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Founder and Executive Director of the recently launched Women, Heart and Brain Global Initiative at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). She is a clinical neuroscientist and internationally-recognized expert in understanding sex differences in health and diseases associated with the central nervous system. Her work has focused on sex differences in depression, psychoses, memory decline and Alzheimer’s disease, and the comorbidity of these disorders with general medical disorders, in particular, cardiometabolic diseases. Her program of research, called the Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory of Sex Differences in the Brain (http://cnl-sd.mgh.harvard.edu) consists of an interdisciplinary team of investigators integrating brain imaging, physiology, neuroendocrinology, genetics, markers of immune function, and collaborative efforts with preclinical studies of genes, hormones, and the brain. Dr. Goldstein’s work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health for about 30 years. She has published over 170 articles, chapters and other original and peer-reviewed work in these areas. In 2007 she was named the Spinoza Professor by the Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam for her work on the role of hormones and the brain for understanding sex differences in medicine, and in 2015, she received the Distinguished Scientist Award from the National Association for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression. Dr. Goldstein has been on scientific research advisory boards at the Harvard hospitals and other institutions and hospital oversight committees involving women’s health, clinical and translational research, and clinical investigation. Nationally, she has served on several scientific review boards and participated in strategic planning for the National Institute of Mental Health, NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health, and the Institute of Medicine. Finally, Dr. Goldstein is a leader in training the next generation in women’s health and sex differences in medicine.
Recently, she and Dr. Ana Langer launched a new initiative (Women, Heart and Brain Global Initiative), a collaborative effort of MGH and Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health partnering with the Women’s Heart Alliance and WomenAgainstAlzheimer’s. The goal is to tackle the comorbidity of major depression, cardiovascular disease, and Alzheimer’s disease, three major public health challenges of our time, by applying a sex differences lens that will integrate shared causes and consequences to more effectively develop personalized sex-dependent therapeutics and healthcare systems.
