Dr. Alex R. DeCasien, PhD, Stadtman Investigator in the Laboratory of Neurogenetics at NIH’s National Institute on Aging, has won the 2024 Biology of Sex Differences Early Career Award for their paper “Sex differences in the human brain: a roadmap for more careful analysis and interpretation of a biological reality.”
In their 2022 BoSD paper, Dr. DeCasien and colleagues laid out an accessible and methodologically rigorous “roadmap” for spotting real male-female differences in brain data. Rather than simply reporting any variation between groups, their approach guides researchers through a step-by-step process to distinguish true biological signals from statistical noise. Importantly, they also emphasize the need for careful interpretation—encouraging researchers to present findings in a scientifically rigorous and socially responsible way, given the historical misuse of sex-based brain data.
This work is crucial because past studies sometimes conflated real biological signals with artifacts of study design or analysis, leading to conflicting or non-reproducible findings. By clarifying how to avoid these pitfalls, Dr. DeCasien’s framework makes future studies more reliable.
Dr. DeCasien’s work speaks directly to the Women’s Health Research Cluster’s mission of advancing sex- and gender-informed science. This roadmap not only elevates the rigor of neuroscience research but also paves the way for discoveries that will inform women’s health policy, intervention design, and advocacy efforts worldwide.
To learn more, read the full paper in Biology of Sex Differences and check out Dr. DeCasien’s Cluster profile.