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Julia Watson is an economist and health systems specialist with 25 years of experience working on both developed and developing country health systems. She has extensive experience managing people and programs and collaborating with a wide range of partners. Her work focuses on improving health financing systems and strengthening the stewardship role of governments in mixed health systems.

Michael Witt brings more than 33 years of experience as a statistician specializing in survey design and survey data analytics. He has more than 27 years of managing staff at the administrative and project level. Mr. Witt has worked with government clients in fields ranging from energy to healthcare.

Katharine Witgert is a health policy researcher with 20 years of public health and health care policy experience. Witgert manages research and analysis of health system innovations, conducting program evaluations for federal clients, including design, implementation, and reporting of findings. She provides technical assistance to state officials, primarily in the areas of Medicaid reforms and building Medicaid agency partnerships with public health, behavioral health, and social services programs.

Sarah Kozyn is an international agriculture and economic growth specialist with more than 12 years of experience designing, managing, monitoring, and evaluating donor-funded programs focused on agriculture and market systems development, resilience, nutrition, and trade. Her work at Abt has spanned projects in sub-Saharan Africa (Uganda, Ghana), the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt), and South and Southeast Asia (Bangladesh, Cambodia). 

Beth Boulay has 15 years of experience using robust evaluation tools and methods to generate evidence practitioners need to make critical decisions. Her work includes designing and conducting research aimed at identifying effective education interventions that promise to improve student achievement and education outcomes. She has led large-scale, complex evaluations that use a range of research methodologies to assess the impact of policies and programs. Boulay also provides evaluation technical assistance to help increase local evaluators’ capacity to produce rigorous evidence of program effectiveness and implementation fidelity.

Lisanne F. Brown has more than 20 years of experience in public health evaluation and research and a background in epidemiologic and program evaluation methods. She has worked on numerous evaluation and applied research studies for local, state and federal agencies. Her areas of expertise include maternal and child health, health care access, integration of primary care and behavioral health, community-centered health homes, social determinants of health, mixed methods evaluation design and implementation, survey design, and evaluation capacity building.

Nicole Keane, MSN, RN, CPHQ has an extensive clinical and research background in healthcare quality improvement, measure development, team-building and formative evaluation in post-acute and primary care settings. Her focus is providing technical assistance to healthcare systems and clinicians to drive quality improvement through learning and implementing the skills of measure development, implementation, benchmarking, analysis, and report writing.

Bettina Brunner is an international health professional bringing more than 19 years of professional experience working in HIV and AIDS, family planning and reproductive health. She focuses on private sector engagement, program management, private health sector assessments, public-private partnerships in health, health systems strengthening, technical management and grant writing. She has extensive experience working for the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank and is a specialist in West Africa. She has developed and tested policy tools, particularly tools for engaging the private health sector.

Hailu Zelelew is an economist with 30 years of experience in health financing/economics, health insurance, health policy processes, health systems strengthening and economic development. He has worked on development planning and economic cooperation; policy analysis and development; rural development; program design and management; maternal, newborn and child health; family planning and reproductive health; HIV/AIDS; and capacity building. His financial expertise includes health program costing, resource tracking, health financing policy, health insurance, public financial management, and governance. He also has extensive experience with monitoring, evaluation and research.

Dr. Cara Jackson is an evaluation expert with decades of experience designing and managing evaluations of education programs. She has extensive experience with a broad range of evaluation approaches, including quasi-experimental designs, qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis methods, and systematic evidence reviews. Jackson is a former pre-kindergarten and kindergarten teacher, and her work builds on that experience. It has included evaluations of teacher preparation programs, charter school program replication and expansion grants, and a variety of district-level educational programs. She also has developed a framework for democratizing the development of evidence to incorporate a greater variety of perspectives in evaluation. Jackson is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles on a range of topics, including a historical writing intervention and performance pay for educators. She has co-edited two books, one on teacher preparation program design and outcomes and another on assessment education. She has delivered over 50 conference presentations and invited talks in both academic and practice settings and has appeared on numerous podcasts. She currently serves as the president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, on the board of the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, and on the Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research Policymakers Council.