Atalay Demiray, MD, MSc

Physician · Decision Scientist
PhD Candidate at Yale

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Conference Summer 2026 · NIH Tobacco Regulatory Science Meeting

I was honored to present our research at the Summer 2026 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Tobacco Regulatory Science Meeting, organized by CASEL and Westat. The meeting brings together investigators from across the NIH and FDA tobacco regulatory science portfolio, and it was a privilege to put our maternal and infant health projections in front of that audience.

Atalay Demiray presenting the SEP microsimulation poster at the NIH Tobacco Regulatory Science Meeting
Walking an attendee through the SEP model at the poster session.

What we presented

We built the Smoking, E-cigarette use, and Pregnancy (SEP) microsimulation model to evaluate the long-term maternal and infant health effects of reducing nicotine in combustible cigarettes to minimally addictive levels. Across modeled scenarios, the policy was projected to avert approximately 60,000 infant deaths, gain around 37,000 maternal quality-adjusted life years (QALYs, a measure that combines how long and how well people live), and avoid approximately $4.7 billion in pregnancy-related medical costs between 2027 and 2100.

The poster, “Projecting the Maternal and Infant Health Impact of a Federal Nicotine Product Standard” (download the poster), is the latest iteration of the work we presented at the SMDM 48th Annual Meeting in Oslo earlier this summer, and the modeling framework is described in our medRxiv preprint. The project is a collaboration between the Yale School of Public Health and the Rutgers Institute for Nicotine and Tobacco Studies (INTS).

What comes next

I greatly appreciated the thoughtful discussions on the model and its policy implications. We are now incorporating that feedback as we finalize the manuscript, and I am looking forward to sharing the published model and its results soon.

Thanks

A special thank you to my mentor, Jamie Tam, for her guidance and continued support, and to my coauthors Sarah Skolnick and Charlene Cheng for their rigorous work and collaboration.

Demiray, A., Skolnick, S., Cheng, C.-L., & Tam, J. (2026). Projecting the maternal and infant health impact of a federal nicotine product standard. Poster, NIH Tobacco Regulatory Science Meeting, Summer 2026.