Advancing best practice for incorporation of gender analysis in health research

Dr. Shirin Heidari is the founding president of GENDRO, an association with the mission to advance gender-sensitive research and data analysis. She is also Senior Technical Consultant on Gender and Health to World Health Organization (WHO). In parallel, Senior Researcher at the Global Health Center and Research Affiliate at the Gender Center at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, in Geneva.

Before joining the Graduate Institute, Dr Heidari was the Executive Director of Reproductive Health Matters and Editor-in-Chief of its peer-reviewed journal, and prior to that she oversaw the Research Promotion Department of the International AIDS Society and was the editor of the Journal of the International AIDS Society. She received her doctorate degree in clinical virology and experimental oncology from Karolinska Institute in 2001, where she continued as an HIV researcher until she moved to Geneva in 2007.

She has been a board member of Amnesty International, Sweden and is the founding chair of the Gender Policy Committee of the European Association of Science Editors (EASE). She is the lead author of the Sex and Gender Equity in Research (SAGER) guidelines and has given a TEDx talk encouraging gender-sensitive research and scholarly communication.