Chloe Bird, PhD (OC '86)
Making Invisible Gaps Visible: What Women's Health Can Teach Us About Science, Equity, and Discovery
Why do important gaps in scientific knowledge persist even when we know they exist? In this talk, Dr. Chloe Bird explores a question that has shaped her work for decades: why has medicine often lacked the evidence needed to provide optimal care for women and other understudied populations?
Beginning with her experiences as a graduate student examining disparities in cardiovascular care for women, Dr. Bird traces how questions about fairness in health care became questions about fairness in science itself. She will discuss research showing the economic and health benefits of investing in women's health, surprising findings about national research priorities, and why simply documenting gaps in knowledge has not been enough to close them.
The talk will also introduce an emerging approach called "evidence intelligence," which uses new analytic tools to identify where scientific attention, research investment, and human need are out of balance. While rooted in women's health, this work raises broader questions about who gets studied, what gets funded, and how society decides which problems are worth solving.
Part science, part policy, and part story about persistence, this talk invites students to think about how knowledge is created, whose experiences become visible, and how evidence can be used to drive meaningful social change.
