Courts still can’t measure psychological abuse. Your research could help fix that.
Be Still Foundation is building a genuinely evidence-based way to quantify chronic psychological and economic abuse — something that could hold up as real data in a courtroom, not just testimony. We're looking for researchers across genetics, neuroscience, stress biology, data science, biostatistics, public health, and criminology to help build it, and to pursue NIH and NIJ funding together.
One evidence base. Built from several sciences.
No single discipline gets there alone. These are the fields where we think the strongest contributions could come from — and we mean this list as a starting point, not a ceiling.
Allostatic load & chronic strain
Chronic psychological abuse produces measurable physiological strain — cortisol dysregulation, chronic inflammation, oxidative stress. The same biology used in cancer and stress research, applied to a court-usable measure of abuse severity.
Molecular markers of chronic stress
Methylation changes in genes like NR3C1 and FKBP5 are already documented markers of chronic stress exposure. No one has systematically built or validated a panel specifically as an objective marker of abuse severity.
Neurobiology of chronic trauma
Hippocampal and amygdala changes, HPA-axis dysregulation — findings your field already treats as legitimate evidence of harm elsewhere. Psychological injury from chronic abuse currently gets nothing comparable to imaging for physical injury.
Predictive modeling at scale
NIH already funds this direction — a Mass General Brigham team's ML model predicts intimate partner violence risk from medical records at 88% accuracy. We want to go a layer deeper: modeling severity and harm, not just risk of an incident.
Building a better instrument
The tool courts actually use today, the SARA-V3, has published research showing weaker reliability than its predecessor. That's a real, citable psychometric gap — and a concrete opportunity to design and validate something better.
Prevalence, courts, and outcomes
NIJ's Violence Against Women research program has funded 200+ studies specifically on measurement of IPV and how courts respond to it — the most directly aligned funder for population-level and justice-system research.
Tell us where you work
If your research touches chronic stress, trauma, measurement science, or justice-system outcomes and isn't listed here, we want to hear from you. The form below has an open field for exactly this.
The institutes are receptive. The gap is real and citable.
This isn’t a hypothetical ask into a closed door. NIH is already funding adjacent work, and the instrument courts rely on today has a documented, published weakness.
NIH is already moving here
A team at Mass General Brigham just published an NIH-funded machine learning model predicting intimate partner violence risk from medical records at 88% accuracy — detecting risk more than three years before someone sought help.
The current tool has a known gap
The SARA-V3, the standard risk-assessment instrument used in domestic violence cases, has published psychometric research showing weaker reliability than its predecessor — a real, citable opening for better science.
A defined, consenting study population
A cohort of participants moving through a structured 12-week program, with full IRB oversight and trauma-informed consent built in from day one — the kind of access that's hard to secure independently.
Realistic first target: NIH's R21 mechanism, built for exploratory research without preliminary data yet, plus NIJ's Violence Against Women research program, given the court-use angle specifically. Both are structured for exactly this stage of an idea.
Not a favor. A real collaboration, aimed at a joint grant.
Co-investigator status, full authorship, and a study population that's rare to access independently — this is a trade, not a request for free labor.
Help design the study
Shape the actual research question and methodology from day one — not reviewing a finished plan.
Co-author the grant application
As co-investigator, with full authorship on anything that comes from it.
Use our program as the study population
A defined cohort of consenting participants moving through a structured 12-week arc — IRB oversight and trauma-informed consent built in from the start.
Point us to the right mechanism
If you've written NIH or NIJ grants before, your read on the right institute, mechanism, or program officer is its own kind of expertise we need.
Tell us about your work. We’ll follow up with an NDA.
A short form, then a real conversation — not an automated screening. We'll reach out within 2 business days with an NDA and next steps.
We’ll tell you exactly what we are.
This is genuinely early: there's no preliminary data yet, no funded grant, and no finalized study design — just a real problem, a population to study it in, and a conviction that the right research team is the missing piece. Be Still Foundation launches its first cohort on September 1: three women from Arizona shelters, a complete program structure, and a firm ready to hire. An early conversation shapes what this becomes, not just how it runs.
Help us build the evidence courts don’t have yet.
No commitment required to start — just a conversation about your field, your funding experience, and where your expertise fits best.