Simone Matecna

Simone Matecna graduated from the University of California Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Peace and Conflict Studies in 2020. At Berkeley, Simone carried out a randomized controlled experiment, working with local school districts to evaluate the impact of a primary caregiver’s payday on the cognitive function of small children. After graduating, Simone worked for three years as a predoctoral research fellow to Dr. Amitabh Chandra at Harvard Kennedy School. Their work uses Medicare claims to show that doctors and their spouses have significantly less emergency department use than socioeconomically matched controls, primarily driven by better access to prescriptions. In 2023, Simone was named an awardee of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Broadly, she aims to develop frameworks for community-clinical partnerships that inform our understanding of place-based disadvantage and systemic racism. Her current work uses mixed methods to examine how place-based inequities—known to affect health outcomes—also shape inequities in healthcare access and engagement with public systems, focusing on historic and ongoing racialized economic segregation.