Maria Rosario Jackson is a senior research associate in the Urban Institute's Metropolitan Housing and Communities Center and director of the Urban Institute's Culture, Creativity, and Communities Program. Her work focuses on urban policy and social change; community planning and development; the role of arts, culture, and creativity in communities; and the politics of race, ethnicity, and gender in urban contexts. Dr. Jackson holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Florence Kabwasa-Green is a consulting research associate at the Urban Institute and has conducted research on arts and community development-related initiatives. Ms. Kabwasa-Green has formerly worked on housing and transportation planning issues in the United States and has been involved in evaluation of local self-help organizations in Senegal and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Ms. Kabwasa-Green holds an M.A. in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Joaquin Herranz Jr. is an assistant professor in the Daniel Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, where he teaches and conducts research on public and nonprofit management, managing networks, workforce development, and creative communities. He holds a Ph.D. in Urban Political Economy and Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Gary J. Gates serves as Senior Research Fellow at the Charles R. Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, a research center within the UCLA School of Law. Dr. Gates is the co-author of The Gay and Lesbian Atlas and a recognized national expert on the geography and demography of the gay and lesbian population. His research has also considered how community diversity can impact regional economic development. He holds a PhD from the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University.
Kathryn L.S. Pettit is a research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Her work focuses on measures of neighborhood change and the role of place in social outcomes. She also serves as deputy director of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership and directs the Institute's work on providing data and analytic content for DataPlace, a national web-based resource for small-area housing and community development indicators. She holds a Masters of Public Policy and a Bachelors of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University.
Kerstin Gentsch is a Research Assistant with the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center. Recently she has been involved in an analysis of the Annie E. Casey Foundation Making Connections survey data on immigrants, producing indicators summarizing employment patterns, work effort, job quality, financial hardship, and assets and debts among immigrants in the ten sites. She also provides database and analytic content for DataPlace, a national web-based resource for small-area housing and community development indicators.
