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"If No One Can Grasp It, What Was the Point?" A Conversation with Leah Prencipe on Making Research Matter

Updated: 5 days ago

In this Q&A, Leah Prencipe talks about the study that first quantified the link between climate distress and youth mental health in Tanzania, the drivers of childhood violence, and why she believes clarity is not the opposite of rigor.



The Researcher


Can you walk us through your background and what led you to the work you do today?

I was born in New York City to Italian immigrants who instilled in me the importance of education and hard work. While I did well academically in high school, I was also quietly struggling with my mental health, and I didn’t have the tools or the voice to ask for help. Looking back, my experience in adolescence helped shape my interest in understanding how young people’s psychosocial well-being is influenced by their environment, and how we can help make them more resilient and hopeful about the future. 


I studied English literature and sociology at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where I found myself drawn again and again to understanding what makes people behave the way they do. But it wasn't until my Master of Public Health at Stony Brook that research and data actually became something I enjoyed. It was like putting pieces of a puzzle together. I would put on my detective hat and try to understand the picture as it came together. During my practicum, I worked with the World Bank's Health, Nutrition and Population team on catastrophic healthcare spending in low- and middle-income countries, which was my first real exposure to research designed to directly shape policy.


After I graduated, I started at American Institutes for Research in Washington, DC, working mostly on large-scale evaluations of social protection programs across African contexts, and later continued similar work at UNICEF Innocenti in Florence. Those projects focused on similar concepts, namely how poverty, gender inequality, and exclusion shape health and wellbeing, with a particular focus on adolescents and women. Working alongside policymakers and local research teams is where my interest in quantitative research really took hold. I got to see how the statistics we were collecting translated into policy decisions that affected people's actual lives.


I later moved to the Netherlands to pursue a PhD in Public Health at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where my research focused on gender, poverty, climate-related stress, and youth mental health. Across my work, I’ve remained interested in how social systems and policies shape mental health, violence exposure, and wellbeing, particularly among young people in low-resource settings.


Leah's early work on social protection sits close to another question she thinks policymakers often get wrong: where violence against children actually comes from.


What are the drivers of childhood violence?

There's rarely one driver; that's actually the first thing I'd want people to understand. Childhood violence tends to cluster, and factors like poverty, gender inequality, social exclusion, and weak child protection systems can compound risks. 


Stress is often an important part of that picture. Caregivers facing financial insecurity, overcrowded living conditions, conflict, or limited social support may have fewer resources to cope with everyday challenges. At the same time, social norms can shape what forms of discipline are considered acceptable, meaning that violence can become normalized within families, schools, and communities. When multiple pressures and risks converge, children become more vulnerable to experiencing violence.


Violence also tends to be self-reinforcing. Children who experience or witness violence are at greater risk of experiencing further violence later in life, with consequences that can extend into adulthood and even the next generation. That is why efforts to prevent childhood violence need to address not only individual behaviors, but also the broader social and economic conditions that allow violence to persist.


On Method


What does rigorous, impactful policy research look like to you, and how do you try to achieve that in your work?

To me, rigorous and impactful policy research is research that is methodologically strong and actionable for real-world settings. The most important steps in achieving these goals are to start with a strong study design and to engage with people who know more than you in some area. This knowledge could be cultural, lived experiences, or disciplinary. Even if plans change (which they will!), starting with a strong foundation, using the right tools to get the answers you seek, and surrounding yourself with competent partners to help you see things you can’t, are all crucial to creating rigorous and impactful research.


Good research is also flexible to the question(s) at hand. This means working across disciplines and across sectors. It also means using methods appropriate to the research question, whether that involves quantitative analysis, qualitative work, or mixed-methods approaches. 

And perhaps most important to me, good research is accessible. That means I try to produce work that policymakers, practitioners, and communities can actually use. That includes communicating findings clearly, getting creative with how to visualize results, and engaging stakeholders throughout the research process.


If a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear, does it make a sound? That's how I feel about research.

On climate and young minds


What is a piece of work or contribution you are particularly proud of, and why?

I want to start out by saying that this has been a group effort, but if I had to pick one piece of work I'm proudest of, it's a paper we published in The Lancet Planetary Health on climate change and youth mental health in Tanzania. 


At the time we came up with the idea for the paper, I was spending a bit too much time on climate doomscrolling and watching young people like Greta Thunberg courageously speak up about a crisis that disproportionately affects the Majority World. At the same time, I was deep in PhD work on youth mental health in rural Tanzania, and a question kept nagging at me: where were their voices in this conversation?


Most research on the topic up to that point examined climate change and mental health through a single pathway: how does physical exposure to the manifestations of climate change impact mental health, or how does worry about climate change (e.g., eco-anxiety) impact mental health?  We wanted to look at multiple mechanisms. Using survey data from Tanzanian youth, we found both pathways mattered. We found that both distress about climate change and living with severe food or water insecurity were associated with worse mental health, meaning that vulnerable populations are at greater risk for multiple exposures. It became one of the first papers to actually quantify the link between climate distress and mental health in a population underrepresented in the literature. 


How do you balance the need for rigor in research with the need to communicate findings simply to reach a broader audience?

If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear, does it make a sound? That’s how I feel about research. You can have the smartest people working on highly complicated analyses, but if they are not able to communicate their results in a way that people can actually grasp, then what was the point?  


As a neurodivergent person, I struggle to absorb large amounts of statistical information when it's presented in dense tables, as academics typically do. Which is ironic because I am a largely quantitative researcher. But I think that’s exactly what sets me apart. I want to share information that I want to consume myself. So I spend the time thinking about how I can share results in visually appealing ways. The numbers are still there for people who want to get into the details, but as much as possible, I prioritize clear and visual communication that keeps things simple and straightforward.  Rigor and simplicity aren't opposites to me, but it can take some effort and thinking outside of the box to make both work simultaneously. 


How do you balance the urgency of the climate crisis with the pace at which research and evidence uptake tends to move?

I think this question assumes that the main challenge is that research moves too slowly, but I’m not sure that’s actually the biggest problem. Climate change itself is mostly a gradual, cumulative process rather than something that happened overnight. The foundations behind the current modern climate science were first discussed in scientific literature almost two centuries ago, ¹and advanced climate models have been around for decades.  ²The bigger challenge, in my opinion, is translating that evidence into action.


In terms of policy research, there is merit to working more efficiently to understand what interventions work, how different communities are affected, and what’s actually feasible to implement in real-world settings.  However, this kind of work takes time, and poorly designed or incomplete research can increase risk for inefficient policy measures or unintended consequences, ultimately leading to a loss of faith in evidence-based implementation science.  For me, the balance is less about pacing research to meet the urgency of the climate crisis and more about making the research count. Going back to the previous questions, it comes back to strong methods and clear science communication.  


Off the clock


What do you like to do in your free time when you’re not working?

Outside of work, I enjoy activities that let me be creative or mentally engaged in ways that research doesn't. I do the New York Times crossword every day, which has crossed the line from "fun hobby" into "slightly neurotic ritual I cannot skip." I also cook, write short stories, go to comedy shows with my partner, and walk my cat, Luna, around my neighborhood in Rotterdam on a leash. 


Living in the Netherlands also means a lot of my "free" time goes to learning Dutch. It's been a similar adjustment to the one I made when I moved to Italy in 2015. New language, new culture, and the slow, humbling process of trying not to embarrass myself in another language and failing. I'd love to say I’m at a level of communication I’m comfortable with, but I'm still very much a work in progress, in Dutch and otherwise. I’ll keep working on it!



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About Leah

Leah Prencipe, PhD, MPH has extensive experience supporting large-scale impact evaluations in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Bangladesh, among others. Leah was a consultant with the Social and Economic Policy unit at UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti between 2015-2019 and continues to contribute to a longstanding evaluation of an adolescent-focused Cash Plus intervention on outcomes related to sexual behavior, mental health, and violence in Tanzania. Leah previously worked as a Researcher at American Institutes for Research in Washington, DC, and as a consultant at the World Bank. She completed her PhD in Public Health at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and holds a Master’s in Public Health from Stony Brook University.



¹ Foote, E. (1856). Circumstances affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays. American Journal of Science and Arts, 22(66), 382–383.

² Hausfather, Z., Drake, H. F., Abbott, T., & Schmidt, G. A. (2020). Evaluating the performance of past climate model projections. Geophysical Research Letters, 47(1), e2019GL085369.

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