Recognition affirms Hilary Skalski’s commitment to women’s health research

Recognition doesn’t always come easily in scientific research, but for Hilary Skalski, two recent honors hold immense significance.

Now in her fourth year as a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Physiology at Michigan State University, Skalski was awarded with the department’s 2025 Jack R. Hoffert Research Award and a F31 predoctoral fellowship from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) for her research on the impact obesity has on the endometrium.

“These accolades offer a profound sense of accomplishment,” she said. “It’s affirmation of the value of the hard work behind such an arduous journey.”

This journey has led Skalski to explore how obesity alters the endometrium, which is the inner lining of the uterus. This can lead to an increased risk of disorders like endometrial hyperplasia, a precursor to cancer that is often accompanied by abnormal uterine bleeding. The endometrium relies on the balanced interplay of the hormones estrogen and progesterone to regulate its cycle of growth, remodeling, and shedding. Skalski’s work focuses on how obesity disrupts this balance and causes harmful, cell-specific changes that promote disease.

“Obesity is a significant risk factor for endometrial hyperplasia and endometrial cancer,” said Ronald Chandler, Skalski’s mentor and principal investigator. “Hilary discovered a new endometrial stromal cell subtype that’s specifically impacted by obesity in women. Interestingly, she found that epithelial tumor cell precursors are not impacted by obesity as much as the neighboring endometrial stroma.”

To make this discovery, Skalski designed a highly targeted experimental approach.

“One of the most important things she did was recognize that obesity causes female humans and mice to spend more time in the estrogen-dominant proliferative stages of the menstrual cycle due to a diminished post-ovulatory rise in progesterone,” Chandler explained. “She focused all her experiments on this cycle stage, as she puts it, to study the specific ‘window of exposure’ to obesity. We would not have found this new stromal cell subtype without Hilary’s keen observations and willingness to make sure every mouse in her studies were in the same stage of the cycle. This took a tremendous amount of effort and work.”

Her discoveries were not the result of chance nor were they made overnight. Skalski’s path to her current research began during her earlier career in clinical care. After earning a B.S. in Diagnostic Medical Sonography from Grand Valley State University, she spent five years working in a hospital as an ultrasound technologist. There, she frequently encountered patients with obesity-related complications, particularly in the context of OBGYN scans. The connection between metabolic disease and reproductive health became increasingly clear and impossible to overlook.

“Most of my scans were OBGYN related, so I was intrigued to combine those two topics,” she said.

Motivated by those experiences, she returned to GVSU to earn a master’s degree in biomedical sciences. For her thesis, she studied how obesity affected immune cell composition in the epididymis of the male reproductive tract of mice. When she began her studies in the Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Physiology Ph.D. program at MSU in 2021, Skalski was drawn to Chandler’s lab for its focus on the female reproductive system and the emerging research on how obesity affects endometrial disease.

“Over the years, she has grown to be an outstanding researcher and cultivated a curious and analytical mindset, spending time thinking about her results, often consulting the literature and planning her next experiment” said Chandler, adding that Hilary initially started in his lab with the goal of teaching sonography to college students. “Importantly, she’s now clearly driven by discovery and curiosity, which is an important trait for researchers to have.”

Skalski anticipates completing her Ph.D. by fall 2026. Her long-term goal is to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship in female reproductive health and then transition to an academic position that allows her to blend research with undergraduate teaching and mentorship.

“I am pursuing both roles as I take pride in guiding undergraduates to a deeper understanding of scientific principles,” she said. “But I also desire to provide supportive mentorship to aspiring researchers, fostering their passion for discovery and helping them navigate the path toward academic and scientific achievement.”

It’s a path Chandler is confident Skalski will succeed on.

“Hilary is smart and hardworking, but what makes her stand out is her diverse education and career path and passion for women's health and reproductive physiology," he said. “Her past experiences show she has a lot of resilience, which gives me confidence Hilary will be successful in the next steps in her career.”

Though the recognitions she received this year is deeply meaningful, Skalski sees these honors as a reflection of her growing commitment to advancing research in women’s reproductive health, which is a field still underrepresented in science.

“These awards serve as a reminder to us that sometimes it may seem like our contributions are just a mere drop in the vast ocean of scientific discovery,” Skalski said. “However, they are nonetheless meaningful and appreciated.”

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