About The Programs
BIRCWH
The Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH, pronounced “birch”) is a mentored career-development program. It connects junior faculty, known as BIRCWH Scholars, to senior faculty with a shared research interest in women’s health and sex-differences research. Since the program was created in 2000, 77 grants to 41 institutions supporting more than 613 junior faculty have been awarded by ORWH and BIRCWH program co-sponsors. The Duke University/North Carolina Central University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill BIRCWH programs are two of 20 active programs across the United States.
The current round of BIRCWH Programs is supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Office of AIDS Research, and the National Institute of Mental Health. ORWH and NIDA provide programmatic oversight for these BIRCWH Programs, and NICHD provides the grants management oversight for most of the programs.
To be eligible for the BIRCWH Program, junior faculty — men and women — must have recently completed clinical training or postdoctoral fellowship and must plan to conduct interdisciplinary basic, translational, behavioral, clinical, and/or health services research relevant to women’s health. Most BIRCWH Scholars move on to obtain independent NIH grant funding following their participation in the BIRCWH Program.
WRHR
The WRHR Program began in 1998 to provide the opportunity for obstetrician/gynecologists (OB/GYNs) who recently completed postgraduate clinical training to further their education and experience in basic, translational, and clinical research. Program sites provide OB/GYN departments with an opportunity to create a pool of junior investigators with expertise in women’s reproductive health research. The WRHR Program is funded through NICHD’s Gynecologic Health and Disease Branch and co-sponsored by the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health using the NIH Mentored Research Scientist Development Program Award (K12) mechanism.
There are 15 WRHR sites in OB/GYN departments throughout the nation. The primary goal of these sites is to provide OB/GYN junior faculty with state-of-the-art training in women’s reproductive health research in an academic setting, and to increase the research capacity of clinically trained OB/GYNs. WRHR scholars represent a diverse group of physician-scientists from several subspecialties and emerging areas in OB/GYN who pursue a broad range of basic science, translational, and/or clinical research topics.
WRHR encompasses all areas of OB/GYN research. The focus is on scientific topics relevant to general OB/GYN and/or its subspecialties, including maternal and fetal medicine, gynecologic oncology, reproductive endocrinology and infertility, and female pelvic medicine and reconstructive surgery (urogynecology). Related fields, such as perimenopause and adolescent gynecology, are also of interest. Senior investigators from established research programs, which address a broad range of basic and applied biomedical and biobehavioral science, in OB/GYN and collaborating departments form an intellectual and technical research base for mentoring WRHR scholars.
Annual Symposium
Despite well-known athletic rivalries, Duke, NCCU, and UNC have embraced the spirit of scientific collaboration in an effort to improve the well-being of all. This annual symposium is just another way the three universities can share resources to nurture the careers of junior faculty at both institutions while bringing fresh perspectives to the field of women’s health. This meeting is held annually for the benefit of all members of the UNC, NCCU, and Duke BIRCWH and WRHR programs – scholars, leaders, and mentors.