Jay Carter is a principal research associate in the Work, Education, and Labor Division at the Urban Institute and the team lead for the Education Data Portal, a one-stop collated and harmonized repository for education-relevant data.

Before joining Urban, Carter was an aerospace engineer and then transitioned into education research, where he spent time in the Wake County Public School System as a research analyst. He earned degrees in aerospace engineering and sociology from North Carolina State University before becoming a PhD student in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.