Awards & Honors

2026 Antman Bair-Merritt Gender Equity Endowed Fund Awardees Named

Maya Abdallah, MD, and Seungbin Oh, PhD, are the 2026 recipients of the Antman Bair-Merritt Gender Equity Endowed Fund awards. Created in 2021 through a donor gift and a $50,000 NIH prize, the fund supports BU faculty pursuing research or educational projects on gender equity in biomedical science. Two $5,000 awards were offered this year, usable for career-advancing needs such as project costs, grant writing, conferences or caregiving. 

Abdallah, assistant professor of medicine/hematology & medical oncology, will examine how factors including gender shape patients’ and caregivers’ communication needs, navigation challenges and experiences engaging with supportive care services in safety-net oncology settings. Dr. Abdallah is conducting a study focused on integrating guideline-recommended geriatric assessments (GA) into real-world oncology practice. Although GA improves communication and treatment decision-making for older adults, its implementation remains limited by workflow constraints, documentation burden, interpreter needs and care-navigation challenges. These barriers meaningfully impact care and disproportionately affect women, who more often shoulder caregiving responsibilities and face compounded communication and system-level challenges.

Oh, assistant professor of psychiatry, will examine how gender and sexual identity shape disclosure of suicidal ideation and responsiveness to screening tools among youth in both community and medical settings. By centering gender as a core analytic lens rather than treating it as a covariate, this work challenges gender neutral assumptions embedded in current assessment practices and aims to strengthen culturally responsive engagement and intervention strategies for individuals across diverse gender backgrounds. Findings will be incorporated into graduate-level training in mental health counseling and behavioral medicine, strengthening trainees’ capacity to recognize gendered expressions of distress, practice culturally responsive care and promote equitable clinical outcomes.