CALL FOR NOMINATIONS
M. Irené Ferrer Scholar Award in Gender-Specific Medicine
The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine and the Department of Medicine are pleased to announce the Call for Proposals for the annual $60,000 M. Irené Ferrer Scholar Award in Gender-Specific Medicine. Dr. Ferrer was a cardiologist and medical educator who helped refine the cardiac catheter and electrocardiogram, which became diagnostic essentials in the treatment of heart disease. She joined the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1946, was promoted to the rank of Professor of Clinical Medicine in 1972, and became Professor Emeritus in 1981. She died in 2002 at the age of 89.
Gender-specific medicine is the science of the differences between males and females, not an isolated study of females or women’s health, and its research encompasses all levels of investigation from basic bench research with cultured cells to clinical or epidemiological studies.
The research proposed for support by the M. Irené Ferrer Scholar Award should include gender as a specific variable in the protocol. Both investigators already conducting gender-specific research or research that addresses gender-specific issues as well as those entering the field are encouraged to apply. Applicants must include preliminary or supporting data related to the gender-specific issues of their proposal and must describe how the funding, if awarded, would permit them to obtain preliminary data that would lead to federal funding for a research (R) grant. One award, of $60,000 is available annually, directed towards junior faculty holding a full-time Assistant Professor appointment in the Department of Medicine. Recipients of other internal or extramural funding are eligible to apply.
All areas of investigation are eligible: basic, translational, clinical, epidemiological, or outcomes research.
The deadline for submission is December 4, 2017. A committee of senior faculty in the Department of Medicine will review the applications. The recipient will be announced in January 2018 and the awards ceremony will occur at the Foundation Gala in May 2018 in New York City.
The application, as described below, should be sent by e-mail as one attached file (in pdf format) to Dr. Jaime S. Rubin, Vice Chair for Investigator Development, Department of Medicine. Please include “Ferrer Scholar Award” in the Subject line of your e-mail.
1. Cover page with applicant’s (A) Name; (B) Title; (C) Division in the Dept. of Medicine; (D) Contact information [e-mail and telephone number]; and (E) Title of proposed research project.
2. Research proposal (3-pages maximum, including figures; literature cited on following page). Proposal should follow the NIH format: (A) Specific Aims, (B) Significance, (C) Innovation, and (D) Approach and must include a discussion of the statistical approach and analyses. Preliminary Studies/Pilot Data are not a requirement
3. NIH biosketch (5-pages maximum)
4. Listing of all peer-reviewed publications
Please contact Dr. Rubin, jsr9@columbia.edu, 342-3184, if there are any questions.
Download .pdf, M. Irené Ferrer Scholar Award in Gender-Specific Medicine
Marianne J. Legato, MD, Ph. D. (hon. c.), FACP is an internationally renowned academic, physician, author, lecturer, and pioneer in the field of gender-specific medicine. She is a Professor Emerita of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Dr. Legato is also the Director of the Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine, which she founded in 2006 as a continuation of her work with The Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University. She received an honorary PhD from the University of Panama in 2015 for her work on the differences between men and women.
At its core, gender-specific medicine is the science of how normal human biology differs between men and women and how the diagnosis and treatment of disease differs as a function of gender. Dr. Legato’s discoveries and those of her colleagues have led to a personalization of medicine that assists doctors worldwide in understanding the difference in normal function of men and women and in their sex-specific experiences of the same diseases.
She began her work in gender-specific medicine by authoring the first book on women and heart disease, The Female Heart: The Truth About Women and Coronary Artery Disease, which won the Blakeslee Award of the American Heart Association in 1992. Because of this research, the cardiovascular community began to include women in clinical trials affirming the fact that the risk factors, symptoms, and treatment of the same disease can be significantly different between the sexes. Convinced that the sex-specific differences in coronary artery disease were not unique, Dr. Legato began a wide-ranging survey of all medical specialties and in 2004, published the first textbook on gender-specific medicine, The Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine. The second edition appeared in 2010 and the third edition, dedicated to explaining how gender impacts biomedical investigation in the genomic era, won the PROSE Award in Clinical Medicine from the Association of American Publishers in 2018. A fourth edition is forthcoming.
She also founded the first scientific journals publishing new studies in the field, The Journal of Gender-Specific Medicine, and a newer version, Gender Medicine, both listed in the Index Medicus of the National Library of Medicine. She has founded a third peer-reviewed, open access journal, Gender and the Genome, which focuses on the impact of biological sex on technology and its effects on human life.
Dr. Legato is the author of multiple works, including: What Women Need to Know (Simon & Schuster, 1997), Eve’s Rib (Harmony Books, 2002), Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget (Rodale, 2005), Why Men Die First (Palgrave, 2008), The International Society for Gender Medicine: History and Highlights (Academic Press, 2017), and most recently, The Plasticity of Sex (Academic Press, 2020). Her books have been translated into 28 languages to date.
As an internationally respected authority on gender medicine, Dr. Legato has chaired symposia and made keynote addresses to world congresses in gender-specific medicine in Berlin, Israel, Italy, Japan, Panama, South Korea, Stockholm, and Vienna. In collaboration with the Menarini Foundation, she is co-chairing a symposium on epigenetics, Sex, Gender and Epigenetics: From Molecule to Bedside, to be held in Spring 2021 in Italy. She maintains one of the only gender-specific private practice in New York City, and she has earned recognition as one of the “Top Doctors in New York.”
