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Jane Pepperall is a senior health professional with over 30 years of experience in global health policy development and in supporting national health sector development in the Pacific, Asia, and Africa. She has focused on strategy and investments to strengthen health systems and health financing. Jane worked for the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) (now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) for 20 years, including health adviser postings in Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Pakistan, and the Pacific. More recently she has been providing health strategy, policy, and technical advice to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).

Eric Reading leads major initiatives at the enterprise level for Abt Global, particularly in areas of strategic priority including digital transformation. He previously led Abt Global’s International Development Division, the largest division of the firm.

Dr. Reerink has more than 25 years of experience in promoting gender equality and social inclusion in international development, with a strong focus on the Asia-Pacific region.

Shelby Hickman is a mixed methods research and evaluation professional with 14 years of experience in program evaluation, training and technical assistance, and analysis of criminal and juvenile justice administrative data. Dr. Hickman has expertise in overseeing studies funded by the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services. She has experience in causal inference methods for both random assignment and quasi-experimental designs. Additionally, she is proficient in qualitative methodologies, such as semi-structured interviews, focus groups, cognitive interviews, and observations. Hickman is also an expert in forced labor and human trafficking.

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.

Adam Schaefer has over 16 years’ experience developing and managing environmental epidemiology research and evaluation projects. He is an expert in the health impacts of environmental exposures and has worked on both national and international projects, focusing on infectious disease, toxicology, health surveillance, and One Health. Before coming to Abt, Schaefer was a researcher at Florida Atlantic University. He has published numerous epidemiological studies in peer-reviewed journals.

Dereje Dengela is an epidemiologist and entomologist with more than 25 years of experience in planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of malaria control programs. He has extensive managerial experience, having supervised as many as 94 professionals. He has held senior positions with the government of Ethiopia, worked on projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and served as a national malaria program officer in Ethiopia. He supported the Ministry of Health of Ethiopia in mobilization of financial resources from donors, particularly the Global Fund. Dengela has authored or co-authored more than 30 publications in peer-reviewed journals.

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.

Sean McClellan, Ph.D. is a mixed-methods researcher with over a decade of experience in full cycle health services research. He has experience managing research projects, developing analytic designs, cleaning and analyzing administrative data, fielding rigorous surveys, conducting qualitative interviews, and communicating findings in plain language.

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.