The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC)/Harvard Medical School (HMS) Center for Reproductive Outcomes of Stress and Aging, or ROSA, is an NIH-funded research center that assembles a collaborative network of leading investigators across many HMS-affiliated Institutions such as BIDMC, Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Harvard Pilgrim HealthCare Institute (HPHCI), and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). This research community has established a national sex-focused research Center investigating how stress exposures and how neural regulation transmits stress to worsen women’s health during and after menopause. Research and educational outputs from the Center will translate to ameliorating the adverse health consequences of reproductive aging among postmenopausal women.
Currently, the ROSA Center is in the second five-year term in which the team is investigating the impact of both individual- and neighborhood-level stress exposures on vasomotor symptoms (VMS) and problems with sleep, mood, memory, and cognition during menopause. Our overall goal is to catalyze the growth of translational women’s health and sex-differences research through cutting-edge and synergistic research Projects and Cores under effective administrative leadership.
Our overall goal is to catalyze the growth of translational women’s health and sex-differences research through cutting-edge and synergistic research Projects and Cores under effective administrative leadership.
We have assembled an expert interdisciplinary team to undertake clinical, population, and basic science research that will have translational impact on women’s aging health. Our Projects will investigate stress in relation to reproductive health conditions, with a specific thematic focus on vasomotor symptoms, sleep, cognitive, and cardiometabolic outcomes, and on both social and physiologic stress exposures. Outcomes of these conceptually and logistically interrelated Projects will inform each other’s scientific activities. This synergy will allow our Center to more rapidly and dynamically propel the field of aging women’s health compared to individual research projects alone.