By Aubrie Sofala

A scholarship gave Sarina Abrishamcar a chance to discover how a mother’s exposure to chemicals can mark her child’s DNA for life.

Sarina Abrishamcar 22PH 27PhD had already taken the MCAT. She was on track for medical school until her faculty advisor asked her a question that clarified her path forward.

“If you like research, then why are you applying to medical school?” asked Anke Huels, associate professor at the Rollins School of Public Health.

“I have no clue,” Abrishamcar responded.

She pivoted, resting in her belief that the things that happen to you are often the best things for you — a lesson to trust the process. She chose to pursue a doctorate in epidemiology and dive fully into her research. 

(Sarina Abrishamcar 22PH 27PhD)

Her master’s work had looked at how a mother’s smoking or drinking during pregnancy leaves biological “marks” on DNA that can shape a child’s development. Her PhD research goes further, exploring what happens when a chemical exposure — like pesticide use in agricultural regions — combines with the stress of poverty, food insecurity, or unsafe home environments during pregnancy.

“We’re exposed to a million things at once — nothing is in a vacuum,” Abrishamcar explains.

Using data from a long-running birth cohort study in Cape Town, South Africa, she’s tracing how these combined pressures leave a biological imprint on children, one that can shape neurodevelopmental and behavioral outcomes such as anxiety, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, and depression.

Abrishamcar considers herself fortunate. A training grant and a fellowship from the National Institutes of Health that fund her work have remained steady. Many of her peers have seen their research funding reduced or eliminated as the federal government has cut support for academic public health across the United States since 2025. Faculty members in her own program have lost grants and been forced to lay off staff, a loss she says “trickles down to the student.”

It’s a preview of what’s becoming increasingly common: Federal research funding, long the backbone of graduate research, is no longer something students or their advisors can count on.

“Very talented researchers are sometimes just trying to make it by on the stipend,” she says. “These scholars end up getting pushed out of PhD programs because of financial pressure.”

It’s why Huels nominated Abrishamcar for additional support through the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Foundation Atlanta Chapter, which backs outstanding scholars in Georgia whose research may advance science, engineering, and medicine in ways that benefit society.

Research funding instability is exactly why unrestricted, donor-funded support like ARCS matters more now than it did even a few years ago. It isn’t a replacement for federal research funding — it’s a buffer against how unpredictable that funding has become.

“There’s a mental load that comes with financial uncertainty that people don’t talk about enough,” Abrishamcar says. “When you don’t have that, you’re able to think more clearly. You’re able to take more risks in your research and do more exploratory analysis. You’re just a better scientist.”

For Abrishamcar, the stakes go beyond the lab. Understanding how these exposures compound gives researchers and policymakers a clearer picture of why children in under-resourced areas face steeper odds, and where interventions might make the most difference. It’s research that only works because someone is willing to study a community closely enough to understand it, which is part of why Abrishamcar insists the researchers doing this work should reflect the communities they study.

“The work can’t stop, even if people think our work’s unimportant,” she says. “We have to believe that it is.”

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