At the Yale School of Public Health, Domenica Berardi is exploring sex differences in colorectal cancer. Historically, the disease has been studied mostly in men, leaving a gap in our understanding of how it affects women.
Berardi is hoping to fill that gap — with support from the Women’s Health Research at Yale Collaborative, the university’s new interdisciplinary research hub centered on women’s health.
For Berardi, who as a postdoctoral associate is just beginning her career, being part of the collaborative has been a unique opportunity to engage with and learn from a multidisciplinary community of scientists and clinicians who have been working in women’s health for years.
“This collaborative is particularly important for my work because, as I’m investigating colorectal cancer in women, I believe that engaging with experts in women’s health will help me refine my research questions, consider novel perspectives, and potentially develop partnerships that amplify women’s health research overall,” Berardi said.
Officially launched in December 2025, the collaborative brings together faculty members, scientists, clinicians, educators, policymakers, postdoctoral researchers, residents, medical students, undergraduates, and more from schools and departments campuswide to strengthen Yale’s reputation as the nation’s leading academic research center for examining sex differences in health as well as conditions that uniquely affect women.
So far, more than 200 individuals have signed up for the collaborative. They represent 10 different schools and 34 different departments, with the top three being internal medicine, psychiatry, and obstetrics, gynecology & reproductive sciences.
Busting silos
For Berardi, who started her postdoc in 2023, navigating the academic landscape and forming meaningful collaborations can feel intimidating. The Women’s Health Research at Yale Collaborative hopes to help members of the Yale community, new and old, do both.
According to Basmah Safdar, director of Women’s Health Research at Yale (WHRY), one of the first academic research centers dedicated to studying the health of women, the collaborative will serve as both a convener and leader, coalescing member interests and expertise to respond to emerging research priorities.
“For the longest time, women were either not included at all in research or were considered ‘small men.’ And in the process, women became invisible in research and in precision-based clinical care,” Safdar said. “For me personally, the collaborative is really about making women visible again by reframing women’s health through a precision health lens, using a tailored, curated, individual-focused and sex-based approach to diagnostics, prognostics, and therapeutics.”
In developing the collaborative, Safdar heard from many members of the Yale community about feeling siloed. “Many said they were sometimes the only person in their departments working in this space and voiced feeling very alone and finding it hard to find collaborators,” she said.
She added: “One of both the beauties and hindrances of working at a very large institution like Yale, which has a lot of expertise and is rich in resources, is that it can sometimes feel too vast and intimidating to find people to collaborate with and people need that extra nudge. The Women’s Health Research at Yale Collaborative hopes to be that nudge, as the connective tissue across Yale, not merely as a venue for individual research but as an active matchmaking and cross-pollination infrastructure.”
For me personally, the collaborative is really about making women visible again by reframing women’s health through a precision health lens.
To build community and facilitate these connections, the collaborative has been hosting both virtual and in person events for members. In the past two months alone, the collaborative has hosted nine meet-and-greet sessions where members were able to network in person. The sessions have been multidisciplinary and multigenerational.
At one of those sessions, a member, who has worked at Yale for 25 years, expressed that it was the first time she’s ever spoken with that many women’s health researchers in a single hour.
“A collaborative forum [like this] will foster opportunities to learn, engage with peers/colleagues, and will serve as fertile ground for intellectual cross-pollination, aligning efforts toward collective success,” said Lubna Pal, a member of the collaborative and professor of obstetrics, gynecology & reproductive sciences at Yale School of Medicine (YSM).
‘Like an incubator’
Based on those group sessions, as well a survey with its members, the collaborative has developed three strategic pillars: to catalyze women’s health research; to develop and invest in a pipeline of investigators; and to accelerate the impact of the research happening at Yale.
“We’re an incubator for early proof of concept research in multiple disciplines of women’s health research, consistent with the fact that every cell has a sex,” Safdar said.
The collaborative builds upon the existing work of WHRY, which was created in 1998, bringing together people across complementary disciplines to find overlap in their research. For example, Attila Feher, a collaborative member and assistant professor of medicine (cardiovascular medicine) at YSM, is researching how immune-mediated inflammation shapes cardiovascular phenotypes and why risk manifests differently in women. That kind of research, he said, requires partnership across cardiology, rheumatology, imaging science, epidemiology/biostatistics, and implementation.
“The collaborative helps me to connect with people at Yale with different expertise and help to build new teams committed to women’s health research,” Feher said.
When we bring very different people from very different backgrounds together, that’s when true innovation happens.
In addition to its dynamic network, the collaborative also provides members with curated grant and funding opportunities, members-only digital content, social media promotion and amplification, peer mentorship, and more. These opportunities are brought to the members each week through a newsletter, called The Exchange.
“When we bring very different people from very different backgrounds together, that’s when true innovation happens,” Safdar said. “We see Women’s Health Research at Yale’s value proposition to connect, support, and amplify our members and their work. Thus, collaboration is in our mission statement and core to how we believe we can move the needle on improving women’s health.”
Women’s Health Research at Yale will host a symposium, together with the Society for Women’s Health Research, on June 15 in New Haven. Learn more and register here.
