Investing in Our Brains: The Hidden Story of Women's Brain Health
11/12/2025 07:00 PM ET
Admission
- Free
Location
Boston, MA
Description
Investing in Our Brains: The Hidden Story of Women's Brain Health
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Museum of Science | Blue Wing
7:00 PM
Registration for this event is now closed.
The Museum of Science and The Boston Club present a vital conversation on women’s brain health, focusing on closing the gap in awareness, research, and care.
Despite making up half of the global population, women remain significantly underrepresented in brain health research, and yet they are disproportionately affected by conditions like Alzheimer’s, depression, and anxiety. Join us for an illuminating evening that explores the latest innovations, shares powerful stories, and charts a path forward for equity in brain health.
Panelists:
- Georgie Kovacs
- Megan Greenfield
- Jill M. Goldstein
- Michael C. Quirk
This expert panel will discuss brain health across the lifespan - from childhood and adolescence to postpartum and menopausal mental health, into aging-related conditions like dementia and Parkinson’s disease. The discussion will draw from recent studies, including a groundbreaking paper published in Nature Mental Health, to shed light on the unique challenges and opportunities in understanding the female brain.
Together, let’s break the silence, challenge the gaps, get involved, and reimagine brain health with women at the center.
Sponsored by
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Our Speakers
Georgie Kovacs
Founder, Fempower Health
Georgie Kovacs is a healthcare strategist and founder of Fempower Health, a platform focused on driving systemic change in women’s health. With 20+ years of experience across biopharma, consulting, and digital health—including roles at Pfizer, Syneos Health, IQVIA, and Bristol-Myers Squibb—she bridges the gap between industry, patient experience, and market strategy.
Through Fempower Health, Georgie has built one of the top-ranked women’s health podcasts, interviewing leading experts to uncover what’s missing—and what’s possible—in care, research, and policy. She is currently leading a cross-sector initiative to address systemic barriers in endometriosis. Her work has been featured on CBS Mornings, GoodRx, Authority Magazine, and the Endometriosis Foundation of America.
Georgie also serves as the Entrepreneur in Residence for Springboard Enterprises, supporting women-led healthcare startups through strategic guidance and mentorship.
Megan Greenfield
Partner, McKinsey & Company; Affiliated Leader, McKinsey Health Institute
Megan Greenfield is a partner at McKinsey and affiliated leader of the McKinsey Health Institute. She is a recognized leader in healthcare, health equity, and advancing equity in the workplace. Megan has worked with regional and global organizations to design practical solutions for employers to drive diversity, equity, and inclusion. She is a frequent keynote speaker on McKinsey and LeanIn.org’s Women in the Workplace report and Broken Rung book, the largest-scale research on the status of women in corporate America.
In 2023, she helped develop and launch the World Economic Forum’s Global Parity Alliance to increase equity in the workplace. She recently released a global report on the impact of our under investment in women’s health at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos “Closing the Women’s Health Gap: A Trillion Dollar Opportunity,” which has been mentioned in over 500 media outlets across the world reaching over 1 billion people and has published several subsequent publications including on women’s heart health, women’s brain health, and how to improve care delivery to address women’s health. She is Trustee for Museum of Science Board and is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. She received her B.S. from Caltech and Ph.D. from Northwestern University, both in chemical engineering.
Jill M. Goldstein
Jill M. Goldstein, Ph.D., M.P.H., is Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Founder and Executive Director, Innovation Center on Sex Differences in Medicine (ICON-✘) (http://icon.mgh.harvard.edu) at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Mass General Brigham Healthcare, and the Helen T. Moerschner Endowed MGH Research Institute Chair in Women’s Health. She is a clinical neuroscientist and expert in understanding sex differences in disorders of the brain and their co-occurrence with general medicine, such as cardiovascular disease. Her program of research (funded by NIH for >30 years) called Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory of Sex Differences in the Brain (http://cnl-sd.mgh.harvard.edu ), consists of an interdisciplinary team integrating brain imaging, physiology, neuroendocrinology, genetics/genomics/transcriptomics, immunology, and collaborations with basic scientists. The studies take a lifespan approach, beginning in prenatal development, to understanding the causes of sex differences in the comorbidity of depression, cardiometabolic diseases, and Alzheimer’s disease. She has received numerous awards to support the work, served on scientific advisory boards for women’s health, brain health, and Alzheimer’s disease, and participated in strategic planning for the NIH and National Academy of Medicine.
Jill spent her career at Harvard training the next generation in women’s health/sex differences in medicine, particularly women in STEM, including leading for >21 years an NIH junior faculty training program on building interdisciplinary careers in women’s health. In 2018, she launched ICON-✘ at MGH whose mission is to enhance discoveries about sex differences in medicine, incorporate them into developing novel sex-selective diagnostic tools and therapies, and engage academic-industry partnerships in this endeavor to contribute to precision medicine.
Michael C. Quirk, Ph.D
Mike Quirk is a trained neurophysiologist and translational scientist with close to 20 years of diverse biopharmaceutical industry experience. Most recently, Mike served as Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) and interim Head of R&D at Sage Therapeutics, where he worked on the first medicines approved for the treatment of Postpartum Depression (PPD) and helped to build a portfolio targeting conditions at the intersection of Women’s and Brain Health. Prior to joining Sage in 2014, Mike was a Director within the Neuroscience Innovative Medicine group at AstraZeneca, working on a variety of programs within psychiatry and neurology.
Mike holds both an S.B. degree in Cognitive Science and a Ph.D. in Systems Neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and completed his post-doctoral training at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York studying neural mechanisms of decision-making and goal-directed behavior.