Carolyn Mazure is inaugural Norma Weinberg Spungen and Joan Lebson Bildner Professor

Carolyn Mazure, newly named as the inaugural Norma Weinberg Spungen and Joan Lebson Bildner Professor in Women’s Health Research, is an internationally recognized expert on women’s health whose research focuses on the development of models for understanding depression and addictive disorders, with a special emphasis on gender-based analyses.

Mazure is professor of psychiatry and psychology, and associate dean for faculty affairs at Yale School of Medicine. She created and directs Yale’s interdisciplinary research center on health and gender — Women’s Health Research at Yale.

After obtaining her Ph.D. from Penn State University in 1980, Mazure completed post-doctoral work at Yale School of Medicine. Her contributions in women’s health began with her own research in the field of depression. Focusing on the prominent gender differences in this disorder, she developed new approaches for examining risk factors for depression, and was the first to demonstrate how stress is a more potent pathway to depression in women than men.

Since its inception in 1998, Women’s Health Research at Yale has initiated new studies designed to answer important health questions for women, provided health data of practical benefit to the community, built new research collaborations across the nation, and launched new investigators into careers dedicated to studying gender-specific aspects of health.

Mazure’s current research focuses on gender effects in onset, recurrence, and treatment response of stress-related disorders and addictive behaviors. She is the scientific director of Yale’s Specialized Center for Research to develop gender-sensitive treatment for tobacco dependence, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Research on Women’s Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse; and the principal investigator for the NIH-funded Yale BIRCWH Scholar Program on Women’s Health and Addictive Behaviors, providing junior faculty with interdisciplinary research training through mentoring, coaching, and team science experience. In addition, Mazure is an investigator on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs-funded Survey of Experiences of Returning Veterans, studying gender differences in post-deployment addictive behaviors among returning combat veterans.

Her honors include the Marion Spencer Fay Award from the Institute for Women’s Health and Leadership, the Elizabeth Blackwell Award from the National Organization for Women, and the Distinguished Leadership Award for Scholarship from the American Psychological Association. Mazure has testified before the U.S. Congress on the importance of women’s health research, served on the planning committee for the first White House Conference on Mental Health, and was a public health policy fellow in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The professorship is endowed by a leadership gift from Elisa Spungen Bildner ’75, and Robert Bildner ’72, which complements gifts from other donors and a foundation that chose to remain anonymous. It is named in honor of Spungen Bildner’s mother and in memory of Bildner’s mother.