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It was an hour of pure brilliance!  On Monday, March 30, 2026, former ARCS Atlanta Scholar Simone Wien defended her dissertation before a panel of experts. Her dissertation was titled Reproductive health policy evaluation: study design considerations for operationalizing exposures, defining endpoints, and communicating findings.

As Simone pointed out at the beginning of her defense, reproductive health is a frequently targeted policy domain in the United States, and epidemiologic studies estimating the effects of these policies have the potential to influence future policy directions. The studies, however, face design and communication challenges, including defining policy exposures under biased implementation, selecting appropriate reproductive endpoints in the presence of competing risks, and communicating study results to policy audiences with entrenched and varied prior beliefs. Therefore, it is important that epidemiologists endeavor to (1) improve the validity of reproductive health policy effect estimates, and (2) strengthen how these estimates are communicated to policy stakeholders.

Simone’s dissertation reinforced the distinct challenges posed by the social, biological, and political aspects of reproductive health when generating and communicating policy effect estimates. As reproductive health policy continues to evolve, the study design and communication approaches demonstrated in Simone’s exceptional dissertation can provide epidemiologists with theoretically grounded and feasible means to navigate these challenges.

In a warm and welcome email to Leslie and Skip Petter who were her ARCS Scholar Award donors from 2022-2025, Simone wrote:

I hope you are doing well! I'm excited to share that I'll be defending my dissertation soon! 

Thank you for your support and all of the work you have done for the ARCS Foundation. Being an ARCS Scholar made a real difference in my graduate training, allowing me to devote more time to my research and pursue advanced methods training outside of Emory. That training ended up being used in two-thirds of this dissertation, which seeks to address study design challenges when evaluating the impact of policies on reproductive health.

I'm also excited to share that this summer I'll be starting as a postdoctoral fellow at UC Irvine, continuing my focus on reproductive health, specifically pregnancy loss.

Leslie and Skip attended Simone’s defense and expressed the feeling well-known to every ARCS donor, “Watching Simone present her research and handle the challenging questions was exhilarating and rewarding.  We are so proud of her accomplishments and proud to have the opportunity to know this remarkable young woman. ARCS made that possible and we are very grateful.”

At the end of Simone’s defense, ARCS Foundation was among the acknowledgements she shared with the many participants. Congratulations, Simone and ARCS. So begins a stellar career!