WHAM looks to boost young researchers in women’s health
Women’s Health Access Matters is offering grants to support early-career scientists. Carolee Lee of WHAM talks about the awards and the need for more investments in women’s health.
At a time of growing concern about supporting young scientists, WHAM is looking to help support young researchers focusing on the health of women.
WHAM, the acronym for Women’s Access Health Matters, is supporting early-career scientists with the 2025 WHAM Edge Awards. The nonprofit organization will provide grants of $25,000 to support studies exploring how gender is tied to health outcomes. Recipients of grants will be notified Oct. 29, with presentation of the awards taking place Nov. 18 (the application period just closed).
Carolee Lee, the chief executive officer and founder of WHAM, tells Chief Healthcare Executive® that the awards are designed to finance promising studies and support young scientists at a time when the federal government has been scaling back investments in medical research.
“The main goal is that, clearly, we're in a time of constraint and change and uncertainty in terms of the funding for women's health research,” Lee says. “So we know that grants have been cut. We know that money’s up in the air. It's very hard for a lot of the researchers to know, in fact, whether their projects will move forward or not. So, a lot of uncertainty.”
(See part of our conversation in this video. The story continues below.)
Lee says it’s important to nurture young scientists to ensure that there’s a pipeline from research to the marketplace.
“If you don't have research, you have nothing ultimately, then, that's going to feed through that pipeline,” Lee says. “And so for me and for WHAM, it's a circular idea of making sure that research, and certainly early-stage grants, early-stage ideas, which might not ordinarily get funded, are, in fact, funded.”
In times when federal funding is becoming more challenging, Lee fears that the first to lose out could be those scientists in the beginning of their careers.
“It’s going to be those nascent kernels of an idea that can turn into something quite significant,” Lee says.
WHAM, which was founded in 2020, has been pushing for more public and private investments of money in women’s health research, making the case that it’s imperative to help improve the health of women.
The group has centered its arguments on the business case for investing in women’s health. WHAM released a report in January spelling out a compelling economic argument. The group projects a $30 billion market for women’s health by 2030. Yet only 2% of all venture capital funding in healthcare is directed to women’s health.
“WHAM and others have created a fair amount of momentum and forward-moving motion in terms of supporting 51% of the population that gives birth, the last time I counted, to 100% of the population,” Lee says. “If women are healthy … families are healthy, societies are healthy, economies are healthy.”
Women face greater risks of certain diseases. About two-thirds of Americans diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease are women, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. More than three-quarters of patients with autoimmune diseases are women, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Plus, heart disease is the number one killer of women, and Lee says there needs to be more work to understand the different risks and aspects of cardiovascular disease in women. “Four percent of the NIH budget, for example, was allocated to women's heart disease when it's the number one killer,” Lee says.
Lee is anxious to see more investments in heart disease, brain health, autoimmune diseases, and areas of women’s health research that haven’t received enough attention.
“We're very much concerned today about areas that just receive no funding whatsoever, so to speak, and that's endometriosis,” Lee says. “Because obviously ovarian health, which is now very much tied into the health span of a woman …. All of these areas are very, very understudied. And imagine the data-rich environment that we could live in and the kinds of diagnosis, treatments and outcomes that we might have if, in fact, we were focused on these areas.”
It’s critical to develop young talent for careers in science to ensure more research in women’s health takes place, and that’s why WHAM has geared awards for scientists early in their careers. She says she’s pleased with the growing field of applicants and growing interest in the Edge awards.
Like other healthcare leaders, Lee says she’s concerned that reducing federal spending will deter some promising talent from pursuing careers in medical research. The Trump administration has proposed a 40% cut in the NIH budget for the 2026 fiscal year, though members of Congress have indicated they may not sign off on such a steep cut. The NIH has terminated more than 2,000 grants this year, forcing universities and hospitals to scale back some research and cut staff.
“You're going to have, I think, a mass exodus of some kind,” Lee says. “If you're an early stage researcher and you can't get funding, where are you going?”
“I think this country needs to focus on the fact that we are scientific leaders, and have been for decades, and that leadership has brought a lot of good health to a lot of us, a lot of change to many of us, and I don't want to see that change,” she says.
“If we're not supporting those early stage researchers, they're not sticking around.”
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