Jill M. Goldstein, Ph.D.

Written By JH

Executive Director & Founder, Innovation Center ON Sex Differences (ICON-✘)
Professor of Psychiatry & Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Helen T. Moerschner Endowed MGH Research Institute Chair in Women’s Health
Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital

Jill M. Goldstein, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Founder and Executive Director of the Innovation Center on Sex Differences in Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and the Helen T. Moerschner Endowed MGH Research Institute Chair in Women’s Health. She is a clinical neuroscientist and expert in sex differences in health and diseases associated with the central nervous system, in particular, depression, its comorbidity with cardiovascular disease (CVD), and risk for Alzheimer’s disease (AD).

She leads the interdisciplinary research program (NIH-funded for >30 years) Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory of Sex Differences in the Brain. She has received numerous awards, served on scientific review boards, and participated in strategic planning for NIMH, NIH ORWH, and the Institute of Medicine. She has spent her career at Harvard training the next generation of women and men in women’s health and sex differences in medicine, including leading an ORWH Harvard K12 training program on building interdisciplinary careers in women’s health.

She launched the Innovation Center on Sex Differences in Medicine (ICON-✘), with her collaborators at MGH [Departments of Psychiatry, OB-GYN, Neurology, and Medicine (Cardiology) and the Harvard-T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Women and Health Initiative and Department of Epidemiology], partnering with WomenAgainstAlzheimer’s, to tackle sex and gender differences in the shared causes of the co-occurrence of depression, CVD, and AD to develop personalized sex-selective therapeutics and healthcare systems globally.

Selected publications:

 Makris N, Swaab DF, van der Kouwe A, Abbs B, Boriel D, Handa R, Tobet S, Goldstein JM. Volumetric Parcellation Methodology of the Human Hypothalamus in Neuroimaging: Normative Data and Sex Differences. NeuroImage. 2013 April 1 (69):1-10. PMID: 23247186.

Goldstein, JM, Langer, A., Lesser, J. Sex Differences in disorders of the heart and brain: A global crisis of multimorbidity and novel opportunity, JAMA Psychiatry Viewpoint, 2020. PMID: 32639554.

Konishi K., Cherkerzian S., Aroner S., Jacobs EG., Rentz, D., Remington A., Aizley, H., Hornig M., Klibanski A., Goldstein JM. Impact of BDNF and sex on maintaining intact memory function in early midlife. Neurobiology of Aging. 2019 doi.org/10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2019.12.014. PMID: 31948671.

Garcia RG, Mareckova K, Holsen LM, Whitfield-Gabrieli S, Napadow V, Barbieri R, Goldstein JM. Impact of sex and depressed mood on the central regulation of cardiac autonomic function. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2020; 45(8): 1280-1288. doi: 10.1038/s41386-020-0651-x. PMID: 32152473.

Garcia, RG, Cohen JE, Stanford, AD, Gabriel, A, Stowell, J, Aizley, H, Barbieri, R, Gitlin, D, Napadow, V. Goldstein, JM. Respiratory-gated auricular vagal afferent nerve stimulation (RAVANS) modulates brain response to stress in major depression, J Psychiatric Res, 2021, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2021.07.048

Blokland, G.A.M., Grove, J., Chen, C., Cotsapas, C., Tobet, S., Handa, R… Petryshen, T.L., Smoller, J.W., Goldstein, J.M.  Sex-Dependent Shared and Non-Shared Genetic Architecture Across Mood and Psychotic Disorders, Biological Psychiatry, 2021, https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(21)01139-2/fulltext DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2021.02.972

Goldstein JM, Cohen JE, Mareckova K, Holsen L, Whitfield-Gabrieli S, Gilman SE, Buka SL, Hornig, M. Impact of prenatal cytokine exposure on sex differences in brain circuitry regulating stress in offspring 45 years later. 2021; Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2021 118 (15) e2014464118;  https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2014464118

JH