SMCR Awards

2013 Awards

Making Menstruation Matter

At our 20th biennial meeting in New York, at Marymount Manhattan College, the first “Making Menstruation Matter” award was bestowed on Gloria Steinem, author of the classic piece, “If Men Could Menstruate.”

Check out this video of the award presentation as well as Ms. Steinem’s remarks.

2009 Awards

At the 2009 meetings of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research, three awards were presented:

  • Diana Taylor Ph.D., RN, FAAN, University of California-San Francisco, received the Ann Voda Award for career contributions to menstrual cycle research. Dr. Taylor received her BSN from Oregon Health and Science University, her MSN and Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner credentials from University of California at San Francisco and her PhD in Nursing from the University of Washington School of Nursing. Early in her research career, she began conducting clinical trials to test health promotion strategies to manage premenstrual symptoms. This work has been widely disseminated along with her descriptive longitudinal studies of the menopause transition of Anglo American, Mexican American, African American and Filipino American midlife women. Dr. Taylor is currently training Midwives, Physician Assistants, and Nurse Practitioners to conduct medication and aspiration abortions and comparing their outcomes to those of physicians at the same facilities in California.
  • Clara Hendricks, recent graduate of University of Massachusetts-Boston and student of Chris Bobel, received a the Esther Rome award for student papers for her presentation, Menstrual Education and the Construction of Womanhood: A Study of Latina Second-generation Immigrants
  • Nicki C. Dunnavant, recent graduate of Colorado College and student of Tomi-Ann Roberts, was awarded the Linda McKeever award for student papers for her presentation, Restriction and Renewal, Pollution and Power, Constraint and Community: The Paradoxes of Religious Women’s Experiences of Menstruation.

Each student award comes with a $250 cash prize.

About the Awards

Ann Voda Lifetime Achievement Award

This award was created in 1999 in recognition of the valuable contributions that Ann Voda, RN, Ph.D, made during her career as a menstrual cycle researcher and founding member of the Society.  Ann’s research focus was on midlife women’s health and the menopause transition. As director of the Tremin Trust, one of the largest longitudinal collections of data on women’s health, Dr. Voda and her colleagues explored the natural history of women’s menstrual cycles and their menopause transitions. In 1997, Ann published Menopause, Me and You: The Sound of Women Pausing. Dr. Voda’s body of work is both foundational and catalyitic, inspiring future research on the topic. This award recognizes an outstanding lifetime contribution to menstrual cycle research.

Mary Anna Friedrich Service Award

Dr. Mary Anna Friederich was secretary/treasurer of the Board for 26 years, from 1981-2007 and a founding mother of SMCR. After attending a St. Louis conference in 1978, she volunteered to serve on the original Steering Committee that followed this conference to form the Society. It was important for our Society to have Mary Anna’s support as a physician; she gave an interdisciplinary perspective on women’s health. This award is given to an individual who has made outstanding and unusual service contributions to the Society.  It is not given every year but at the discretion of the board to a deserving individual.

Esther Rome Student Award for Top Paper

Esther Rome was a tireless women’s health advocate as a member of both the Boston Women’s Health Collective and the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research. Among other interests, she was passionate about tampon safety: her testimony before Congress on tampon absorbency was influential in pushing the industry to provide some standardized absorbency information on tampon packaging for consumers. She presented regularly at SMCR conferences and served on the SMCR board of Directors until her untimely death from breast cancer in the mid-1990s.

Linda McKeever Student Award for Top Paper

Linda McKeever, DNC, WHCNP, was a dedicated women’s health advocate. In her doctoral research she described women’s models of menopause, portraying the normal perimenopausal process. Before her untimely death from a brain tumor in the early 1990s, Linda was an active participant in the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research.

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