The Ann S. Bowers Women’s Brain Health Initiative is an endowed research consortium headquartered at UC Santa Barbara, with researching spanning seven UC campuses, Stanford, Cornell and global collaborators. Our mission is to accelerate the pace of discovery for women’s brain health across the lifespan.
We explore how the brain works by focusing on unique opportunities in women's health. We recognize women's experiences as valuable wisdom that benefits all. Endocrine transitions like menarche, pregnancy & menopause are health inflection points. Like a stress test, they can reveal resiliencies or risks for later life health outcomes. Our goal is to generate the most comprehensive and inclusive collection of data ever acquired for women’s brain health and to share it with the global scientific community.
Advancing women’s brain health will require sustained effort across sectors. The Bowers WBHI is building momentum in three domains:
Research
Harnessing the combined power of the University of California to drive discovery for women’s health
Education
Building a home for the scientific community to support and train the next generation of women’s brain health scholars
Policy & Partnerships
Joining a coalition of stakeholders across government, foundations, and media to educate the public and advocate for sustained investment in women’s health
Science that Serves Society
The health of our communities, our economies, and our planet depends on closing the gender gap in neuroscience. By working together across disciplines and institutions, we can build a future where women's brain health is a cornerstone of medical progress, not an afterthought.
The Bowers WBHI is dedicated to promoting equal access to research, focusing on women's health in ways that benefit everyone. We prioritize inclusion across gender, race, and ability to ensure that brain health research serves our broadest sense of community and promotes health equity. The WBHI is committed to ensuring that women's experiences and health are not overlooked but prioritized in neuroscience research. We are working to bring diverse perspectives and expertise into our mission at all levels—leveraging Big Data and AI to drive scientific breakthroughs that serve all.