After serving four years in the White House, Jill Biden has taken on a new role leading a California think tank’s effort to improve women’s health.
“From endometriosis to healthy aging, the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research made important investments in research and development, while making clear it will take collaboration across industries to bring these innovations to scale,” Jill Biden said, per the Milken Institute press release. “I am honored to join the Milken Institute as we unite leaders around a shared mission: for women everywhere to benefit from the lifesaving, world-changing research we know is possible.”
The Milken Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Santa Monica, focuses on improving financial, physical, mental, and environmental health by developing solutions to major global challenges. Jill Biden will now lead its new Women’s Health Network as chair.
A longtime teacher with a doctorate in education, Biden previously championed cancer research through the Biden Cancer Moonshot. She supported military families through the Joining Forces initiative, and helped launch the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research during her time as first lady, according to Fox News.
She joined the Milken Institute’s 28th annual Global Conference in Beverly Hills on Monday, alongside other speakers including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and former CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, according to the Los Angeles Daily News.
In 2023, former President Joe Biden signed a memorandum launching the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, led by Jill Biden. The goal was to increase funding and research focused on women’s health. The Biden administration pointed out that many medical studies, treatments, and textbooks have been based on men’s bodies, often overlooking how health issues affect women differently.
So one of the things we did was we got to work right away,” Jill Biden said at the Milken Institute conference Monday per Fox News. “Joe said, ‘You know, let’s infuse – really, the federal government with money.’ In one year, we put in $1 billion to advance women’s research.”
“And we worked a lot through the (National Institutes of Health) and the way that they did research, and we made sure that they disaggregated the data and that they separated the research on women and men differently, and we worked with (the Department of Defense) DOD – they put a lot of money into women’s research – and then we put a lot of money in to de-risk the investment. So there were a lot of things that, really, private equity wasn’t willing to take on because it was too risky, and we thought, let’s push this forward, and let’s try to find answers more quickly.”
