Dr. Stacy Lindau is the Catherine Lindsay Dobson Professor in the Departments of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Medicine-Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at the University of Chicago. She is an internationally known expert in the fields of gerosexuality and social care and conducts her work in partnership with the communities she serves.

She was founding Co-PI of the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project (2003), a long-running longitudinal biosocial study on aging, funded by the National Institute on Aging. From this work, she created the Program in Integrative Sexual Medicine (PRISM) and WomanLab.org, both devoted to preservation and recovery of sexual function in relation to cancer and other complex illness and was founding chair of the Scientific Network on Female Sexual Health and Cancer, 501c3, which has named its trainee award in her honor.

In the social care domain, Dr. Lindau leads a portfolio of NIH-funded clinical trials evaluating the CommunityRx intervention, an evidence- and IT-based intervention that aims to systematically connect patients and caregivers via to community-based supports for wellness, disease management and social care needs. CommunityRx, funded in part with a 2012-15 Health Care Innovation Award from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, was brought from “lab to life” in three years. Dr. Lindau founded NowPow, LLC and MAPSCorps, 501c3, testing a collective social impact model to sustain the idea of community e-prescribing. NowPow was the first faculty-founded company at the University of Chicago to put headquarters on Chicago’s South Side where the ideas were created. By 2021, NowPow was employing nearly 150 associates and was acquired in September 2021 by its largest competitor, Unite Us, LLC to reach nearly 20 million customers in 40+ U.S. states and D.C. As of December 2022, MAPSCorps, 501c3 has trained and employed nearly 3000 youth in Chicago, NYC, rural Eastern North Carolina and Hawaii to conduct community asset mapping, generating publicly available data on community assets (www.mapscorps.org) and information used by researchers, government organizations, community organizations, entrepreneurs and others to solve critical problems and create economic opportunity.

Early in the arc of her work on social care and around the time her son was hospitalized for an unexpected stroke, Dr. Lindau discovered the prevalent but overlooked problem of food insecurity among families with hospitalized children. Dr. Lindau and others founded Feed1st, a fully self-serve, “no questions asked” food pantry system that operates 11 sites across pediatric and adult patient ambulatory and emergency care settings at the University of Chicago Medicine. Over more than a decade, Feed1st has distributed 54 tons of food to more than 48,700 individuals. Dr. Lindau’s scholarly work, much of it funded by NIH and other federal agencies, has been published in the highest impact peer-review literature and covered widely by media. Dr. Lindau earned her bachelor’s degree in political science and secondary education at the University of Michigan Honors College and her medical degree at Brown University. She completed her Obstetrics and Gynecology residency and served as chief resident at Northwestern University and earned her master’s degree in public policy as an Irving B. Harris Fellow at the University of Chicago. She was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of Chicago, and she serves the program’s National Advisory Committee. Dr. Lindau was awarded a 2016-18 Aspen Health Innovators Fellowship and is a member of its advisory board and the Aspen Global Leadership Network. Dr. Lindau also serves as a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of RISE, 501c3, an organization dedicated to the elimination of racism through sport.

Please click here for Dr. Lindau’s Conflict of Interest Disclosures (last updated 06/23).