Marokey Sawo is a research associate in the Center for Equity and Community Impact at the Urban Institute, with more than nine years of experience in data-driven research. Sawo specializes in wealth and income distribution, labor market trends, and their relationship with race and gender. She has conducted applied research on such topics as digital access and opportunity, wealth transfers, and the long-term care industry. She is skilled in quantitative research methods, as well as survey programming and administration, literature reviews, and data visualization. She regularly presents at conferences and events to distill complex research findings for diverse audiences.

Before joining Urban, Sawo worked as an economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, where she researched low-wage workers and economic trends at the national and state levels. There, she led work building a more robust methodology for a series that estimates unemployment rates by race and ethnicity at the state level each quarter. Before that, at the Groundwork Collaborative, she conducted macroeconomic research on anti-austerity policy, unemployment insurance, and national labor market conditions.

Sawo holds a BA in economics from Vassar College and an MSc in economic theory and policy from the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.