Hi Reddit! I’m Dr. Teresa Woodruff from Northwestern University here to answer any questions you may have about ovarian biology, oncofertility, and the importance of sex and gender inclusion in the biomedical sciences. In 2006, I coined the term “oncofertility” to describe the merging of two fields: oncology and fertility. When we started this work, young men were able to bank sperm before a potentially sterilizing cancer treatment but women, with the same hope for survival, were not provide options. Now we have options and babies born to men and women who have survived their disease. This work was fostered by my interest in ovarian biology. Men make sperm constantly – about 1,500 sperm with every heartbeat. By contrast, women are born with all the oocytes that we will ever have – about 1 million in our ovaries. My lab is interested in how the ovarian reserve, this million follicle pool (a follicle is a single egg surrounded by cells that produce hormones like estrogen and support egg maturation) is metered out from birth until menopause – 6 decades to wait for activation. We began growing individual ovarian follicles in our lab to unravel some of this fundamental biology and developed strategies that are helping cancer patients who want to protect their fertility. Finally, I’m interested in educating scientists about the value of including both males and females in their studies. For a lot of good reasons, many labs study only one sex. But the outcomes from single sex experiments cannot always be translated to the opposite sex. So we have been working to ensure that we all think about sex as a biological variable from bench to bedside. I will be back at 2 pm ET to answer your questions, ask me anything! Here are some resources for more information: Women’s Health Research Institute Oncofertility Consortium Repropedia Introduction to Reproduction on Coursera EDIT: Thank you for all of your questions! I will be heading out now but may check back in if there are any follow up questions!