Professor Sarah Richardson (WGS/History of Science) has co-authored the article “Sex in Context: Limitations of Animal Studies for Addressing Human Sex/Gender Neurobehavioral Health Disparities,” which appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience in November. In this piece, Professor Richardson and co-author Lise Eliot (Chicago Medical School of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine & Science, Neuroscience) look at the limitations of the NIH policy requiring analysis of sex in preclinical research with respect to rodent studies in neurobehavioral science -- in areas such as pain, depression, and stress research. They argue that sex is not, a priori, more profoundly relevant to biological outcomes than other genetic and environmental sources of variance, which include animal age, strain, diet, housing, social grouping, prenatal experience, experimenter handling, and much more.