The Center for Childhood Safety and Well-being (CSAW) proudly celebrates Senior Research Assistant Simone Piper’s 10-year anniversary, recognizing a decade of leadership, scholarship, and unwavering commitment to preventing child abuse and maltreatment.
By Associate Professor Jeff Todahl, PhD, Director, Center for Childhood Safety and Wellbeing
September 21, 2026
This September marks Senior Research Assistant Simone Piper’s 10-year anniversary with the Center for Childhood Safety and Well-being. Since joining in 2016, Simone has become integral to nearly every dimension of CSAW's research and evaluation work, bringing rigor, curiosity, and a deep commitment to translating evidence into meaningful action. Through her research, partnership building, and dedication to community-informed prevention, Simone has helped shape some of CSAW’s most influential work while strengthening a culture of collaboration, equity, and learning.
Her contributions span the Oregon Child Abuse Prevalence Study (OCAPS), Protect Our Children, Stewards of Children, community level protective factors, youth and survivor informed prevention, and numerous other research and evaluation partnerships.
Over the course of her work, Simone has helped design studies and measures, manage and analyze complex data, listen to and learn from communities, and turn findings into reports, presentations, tools, and peer reviewed scholarship. Her record includes more than 40 technical reports, dozens of presentations, five peer reviewed publications, and service as Co PI on major externally funded projects supporting OCAPS, rural youth inclusion, and statewide child sexual abuse prevention.
Through it all, a consistent thread has been Simone’s commitment to participatory research, community engagement, equity, and the primary prevention of child maltreatment. Yet a list of accomplishments captures only part of what Simone has meant to CSAW. She is a warm, kind, introspective, and deeply thoughtful colleague who brings both intellectual seriousness and humanity to the work. Simone asks important questions, listens carefully, attends to perspectives that might otherwise be missed, and consistently pushes our work toward greater rigor, equity, and usefulness.
Simone has mentored students and research staff, strengthened partnerships across Oregon, contributed generously to the life and culture of The Center for Childhood Safety and Well-being, and increasingly brought CSAW’s learning to regional and national audiences.
Her leadership can be seen not only in what she produces, but in how she works with others: collaboratively, conscientiously, with humility, and with genuine respect for the knowledge of youth, survivors, community partners, and colleagues. Her decade at CSAW has helped shape who we are today, and the impact of those ten years can be found in our science, our partnerships, our prevention work, and in the many people who have had the good fortune to work alongside her.
Prior to CSAW, Simone worked as a data manager with the University of Oregon’s Center for Translational Neuroscience, as a research assistant and assessor with the Oregon Social Learning Center’s Kids in Transition to School program, and served in preschool classrooms at YWCA Clark County Y’s Care Children’s Program in Vancouver, Washington. After graduating from Willamette University with a bachelor’s in psychology, Simone completed a master’s degree in developmental psychology at the University of Oregon. Simone’s research interests include the primary prevention of interpersonal violence, community mobilization and engagement, and collective impact. Outside of work, Simone is often enjoying time with family, reading novels and poetry, or running.
Jeff Todahl, PhD, is the Director, for the Center for Childhood Safety and Wellbeing (CSAW) and an Associate Professor in Counseling Psychology and Human Services; and is a Couples and Family Therapy Core Faculty for the University of Oregon College of Education.