NIDA Women & Sex/Gender Junior Investigator Travel Award

Congratulations to MAPrc Director of Addiction Psychiatry Research and Deputy Head of Department Psychiatry, CCS, Monash University, Dr Shalini Arunogiri who was yesterday awarded a NIDA Women & Sex/Gender Junior Investigator Travel Award for the its annual CDPP Conference. Prior to the onset of COVID-19, the conference was to be held in Florida, USA and While Dr Arunogiri will not be able travel to the conference she will be a virtual attendee.

NIDA is the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (the addiction equivalent of NIMH), and the conference is the US College on Problems of Drug Dependence, the largest and most prestigious addiction research conference internationally. This year, the conference is virtual, so I get to enjoy free registration

Both clinical and preclinical research has shown that the antecedents, consequences, and mechanisms of drug addiction, as well as treatment and prevention outcomes, often differ between males and females. These findings are increasingly reported in drug addiction research as well as in most other areas of biomedical research and raise concerns regarding potential conclusion errors in the published literature either for males or females or both when data are not analyzed by sex or only one sex is studied. In recognition of these concerns, it is now a requirement for NIH-funded research that sex as a biological variable will be factored into research designs, analyses, and reporting in vertebrate animal and human studies, and that compelling justification must be provided for single sex studies. 

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