The Office of Women's Health (OWH) at Wayne State University was founded to improve the health of women over the life span through five pillars:

1) Research and Development
2) Education and Health Literacy
3) Implementation Science
4) Policy and Healthcare access
5) Women in the STEM fields.
 
Choosing Women's Health as a Scholarly Concentration would mean engaging in one or more of these five pillars. Previous experience that would be important include the five pillars.

Mentorship

The SC Project Mentor may be a faculty or an expert in the defined area. If the SC Projector Mentor is not a faculty, then there must be a WSU faculty to serve in the role of a Faculty Co-Mentor or Sponsor. For the women's health scholarly concentration, students are expected to initiate contact with potential mentors. Mentors chosen by the student are expected to agree to certain expectations and requirements set by the Office of Women's Health, otherwise, they would not be approved. Students would meet with their mentors at least every 4 weeks to discuss progress and challenges. Students will develop their individualized research proposal with their mentor, and once approved by the SC director, students will begin to work on their project. Timelines must be in 12, 24, or 36 month lengths.

Requirements

For a student to achieve a women's health scholarly concentration, certain requirements must be met. Checkpoints for student's progress will be every 3 months (for 1 year projects) or 6 months (2-3 year projects) during which the scholarly concentration director will meet with the mentors and students in order to ensure students are meeting expected milestones. Academic Product Each student will plan to create an academic product and this should be defined in the project proposal. All students chosen to participate in the SC program are expected to present their work both in a poster format (during the research day) and oral presentation (during the annual SC event). 

Curriculum and SC Program Structure: All students who are selected for the SC program are expected to complete a common core curriculum. Topics in the core curriculum will include: Literature search, Evaluating the evidence, Research methods, Study design, Research paper writing, Presentation skills. After completion of core curriculum, women's health scholarly concentration students are expected to attend seminars and discussions specific to the women's health scholarly concentration. Additionally, monthly journal clubs will be held during which students will prepare and discuss articles. Students will also present one presentation per year on their research area/topic. The timeline and schedule of meetings would be designed to fit the students' academic schedules.

Women's Health Information Session Recording from 1/19
Passcode: !uw!5*4D

Area Director

Sonia S. Hassan, M.D. 
ad8024@wayne.edu

Associate Vice-President, Office of Women's Health, Wayne State University Professor, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine Wayne State University 

Sonia S. Hassan, M.D. is associate vice-president at Wayne State University (WSU), a professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the founder and director of The Office of Women's Health at WSU as well as WSU's Make Your Date Program, an implementation science program to reduce preterm birth, the leading cause of infant mortality. Dr. Hassan is co-chair of Michigan's Maternal Infant Health and Equity Collaborative. Dr. Hassan leads a State of Michigan Collaborative for COVID-19 in Pregnancy and the Newborn - a research group composed of 12 institutions and hospitals that care for over 50,000 deliveries annually. Dr. Hassan has authored or co-authored over 400 publications and was the lead author of a landmark international trial which demonstrated an intervention that decreases preterm birth by 45%. Dr. Hassan has been an NIH funded researcher for the past 17 years and previously served as the project site manager for the Perinatology Research Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health on behalf of WSU. Dr. Hassan was named the Crain's 13th Annual Health Care Heroes Awardee and a Michiganian of the Year by the Detroit News. She received the March of Dimes Michigan Prematurity Prevention Hero Award and was the honoree of the Michigan March of Dimes for 2018. In 2019 she was the recipient of the Rogerio A. Lobo Award from the Society for Reproductive Investigation. Dr. Hassan is a Fellow of the third class of the Aspen Institute's Health Innovators Fellowship and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. She completed her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Michigan, Medical Degree at Wayne State University and Masters in Business Administration at Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.