Dovile Vilda is an interdisciplinary social scientist and public health researcher with advanced training and experience in mixed methods and policy research. Her work examines the role of state-level policies and other social determinants on maternal and child health. She received her Ph.D. in Social Policy from Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Social Epidemiology at the Mary Amelia Center for Women’s Health Equity Research at Tulane University. Her research interests include mixed research methods, social and health policy analysis, and conducting ethical research with historically low‑access and underserved populations. Her projects have examined health disparities across populations and the impact of state-level policies, structural conditions, and community-level factors on maternal, child, and reproductive health outcomes. In her next research project, she seeks to explore the reasons underlying persistent health differences among children and youth from diverse racial, ethnic, and immigrant backgrounds.

Building on her skills in policy analysis and mixed methods research, she aims to move beyond individual and family-level explanations to investigate how policies and area-level social, environmental, and economic conditions (e.g., concentrated disadvantage, structural racism, and crime) contribute to differences in child health outcomes. During her scholarly retreat, she developed a funding proposal for an interdisciplinary secondary data analysis of the impact of social policies and place-based factors on children’s health outcomes in the US. Activities included reviewing relevant literature, refining research aims and objectives, drafting the proposal, and conducting preliminary data analysis to provide early evidence for the funding application.