2.0 What are the SAGER Guidelines

Dr. Babor spent several years in postdoctoral research training in social psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and subsequently served as head of social science research at McLean Hospital's Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Center in Belmont, MA. In 1982 he moved to the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. He has served as the Scientific Director at the Alcohol Research Center and the interim Chair of the Psychiatry Department before moving to Community Medicine in 1998. Dr. Babor was head of the Department of Community Medicine and Health Care until 2019 and still is actively involved in the study of alcohol marketing and alcohol public policy.

He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, the oldest substance-related journal published in the United States.

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.

Paola De Castro develops communication strategies, including the publication of scientific journals, web communication and organization of events addressed to different stakeholders.  

Paola also carries on multidisciplinary research and training for public health, mainly focused on science communication, health equity, gender balance, health literacy, and research integrity, with research partnerships in Europe, Latin America, and Africa.

She is actively involved in EASE, currently a Member (and former Co-chair) of the EASE Gender Policy Committee producing the SAGER Guidelines.