Molly Carnes

Mary "Molly" Carnes is an American physician who is a professor in the departments of Medicine, Psychiatry, and Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

She Directs the Center for Women's Health Research, the Women Veterans Health Program, and the Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute.

Her research looks to develop interventions that increase the participation of people from historically excluded groups in science.

Carnes was born in Youngstown, Ohio.

Her parents were both veterans of World War II, and her father was a Unitarian minister.

She grew up in Memphis, but moved to Buffalo, New York during the civil rights movement.

She attended The Campus School, a progressive, lab-based educational establishment that provided teacher training.

She was going to apply for languages, and considered Middlebury College, but eventually applied to the University of Michigan.

Her Freshman exams were cancelled due to the Black Action Movement, and Carnes found it difficult to readjust.

She eventually dropped out of college, and worked in several short term jobs before realizing she was happier in formal education.

She moved to the State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine for her medical degree.

Carnes specialized in internal medicine and geriatrics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Carnes started her career working in geriatrics at the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital.

She helped to establish the Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Research Center, which focuses on ageing and Alzheimer's disease.

At the time, concepts such as the social determinants of health had yet to be established, and Carnes had to develop a multidisciplinary approach to support her patients.

The United States Department of Veterans Affairs recognised that only 15% of the United States Armed Forces were women, and there was very little research into women's health.

Simultaneously, the National Institutes of Health set up an Office on the Research of Women's Health.

This prompted Carnes to shift her focus from geriatrics to veteran's women's health.

She was awarded a National Institutes of Health Mid-Career Academic Leadership Award to develop research on geriatric women's health.

She founded the UW-Madison Center for Women's Health Research, which became a National Center of Excellence.

Carnes became interested in the underrepresentation of women scientists, and decided to study the science workforce through an epidemiological lens.

In 2001, she was awarded an National Science Foundation ADVANCE grant, and launched the Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute (WISELI) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Through the WISELI, Carnes performed a climate survey on women faculty members, developed a professorship program, and designed a workshop to train faculty hiring committees in unconscious bias.

Attendance at the faculty hiring committee workshop correlated with enhanced hiring of women faculty members.

Carnes was supported by the National Institutes of Health to develop a training program on bias literacy called “break the bias habit". The WISELI eventually became a well recognized research center, producing both cutting-edge scholarship on the participation of women in science and implementing evidence-based solutions. She was awarded the Barbra Streisand Women's Heart Center Linda Joy Pollin Heart Health Leadership Award.

Carnes worked with the Games, Learning and Society Centre to create an immersive game that introduced players to the impacts of bias.

She showed that video games could reduce implicit bias because they made people more empathetic.

In 2019, Carnes was awarded a WARF Named Professorship, which she named after Virginia Valian, an American psycholinguist.

In 2022, the WISELI was awarded the National Institutes of Health Prize for Enhancing Faculty Gender Diversity in Biomedical and Behavioural Science.