Diana Greene Foster

Why you should listen

A professor at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Diana Greene Foster uses quantitative models and analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of family planning policies and the effect of unintended pregnancy. She led the ten-year nationwide Turnaway Study analyzing the health and wellbeing of women who seek abortion in the United States — including those who do not receive one — and in 2020 published a book, The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion, on her findings. In 2023, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of her scientific work, including the book and more than 120 scientific papers.

Foster has demonstrated the effect of subsidized contraceptives in reducing the incidence of unintended pregnancy and the benefits of reducing barriers to contraceptive supplies. She is currently collaborating on a study of abortion care in Nepal and on a study of the health, legal and economic consequences of the end of Roe v. Wade in the US. In 2021, she received the Harriet B. Presser Award for sustained research contributions to the study of gender and demography from the Population Association of America. In 2022, she was recognized as one of the ten people who shaped science that year by Nature.