About 20 years ago, Julia Bond attended a peer health education group meeting at Bowdoin College when she realized discussions about sexual health programming almost always ignored one topic: pleasure.
“It was a really interesting disconnect where the public health focus was on [topics] that were important but that were not necessarily the primary concern for at least from what I was seeing,” Bond said. “So I kind of went rogue.”
About two decades later, the National Institutes of Health awarded Bond the Director’s Early Independence Award to research the relationship between sexual function and conception.
The five-year grant provides $250,000 annually, which Bond — now an assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University’s School of Public Health — will use to study the connection between sexual wellness before pregnancy and how it ties into conception. She also plans to use the grant to develop a tool facilitating sexual health discussions more easily between clinicians and patients.
After many review stages, Bond — who doubted her unconventional research focus would be chosen — said receiving an NIH grant feels surreal.
“It was a real, affirming moment that skilled, experienced scientists saw the merit in what I was proposing to do,” Bond said.
She attributes the majority of her success to the unorthodox career she’s had. After graduating from Bowdoin in 2009, Bond moved to New York City to pursue a career as a stand-up comedian — a background she still often relies on in her current field. She later started working a day job in a research lab that led her to pharmaceutical advertising.
“Having a sense of humor about [sexual health] is leaning into the fact that people may not have seen scientific presentations about orgasms before and trying to bring some levity to it,” Bond said.
While some might view being referred to as “the orgasm lady” as embarrassing, Bond said she finds it is a way to encourage people to think more holistically about sexual health.
“Even if the only thing I accomplish is just being the orgasm person at the epi[demiology] conferences, in my opinion, that’s something worthwhile,” Bond said. “We don’t have to only talk about STIs. We can talk about orgasms. We can talk about pleasure.”
Bond said she hopes to bridge a similar gap in sexual health conversations between medical clinicians and pregnant patients through the NIH research grant.
Many sexual health issues might be missed because of poor communication, a problem Bond hopes can be solved through the tool she develops.
“There’s a big barrier. Even when people are having issues, they often don’t talk to their physicians,” Bond said. “Having some kind of tool to help facilitate those conversations productively, hopefully might help more people get directed to resources that would be appropriate for them.”
Ruby Barnard-Mayers, a post-doctoral associate at BU SPH and Bond’s colleague, affirmed the importance of Bond’s research.
“She’s asking some really important questions about sexuality [and] women’s health that have been vastly under-studied,” Barnard-Mayers said.
Bond’s NIH award signifies her research abilities, Barnard-Mayers said, while also reflecting her ability to communicate her goals to earn grant funding in the “current landscape.”
Lauren Wise, a professor of epidemiology and principal investigator of BU’s Pregnancy Study Online, wrote in an email to The Daily Free Press that the NIH’s recognition of Bond’s work is “richly deserved.”
“It’s been inspiring to watch Dr. Julia Bond lead pioneering research to understand sexual function in PRESTO.” Wise wrote. “Her creativity, rigor, and leadership have opened up a novel dimension of inquiry in reproductive health”
Bond remains focused on the work ahead of her, determined to fill in the gaps she saw in sexual wellness research in college about 20 years ago.
“We as a field, we can do better,” Bond said. “We can study more than risk.”
