Sharon Long is a senior fellow in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute. She is also an affiliated scholar and member of the Research Advisory Committee at Medica Research Institute and is an occasional consultant to state agencies and foundations. Long rejoined Urban in 2012 after a period as professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. She remains an adjunct professor there.

She has more than 30 years of experience conducting quantitative and qualitative policy research on health and social issues. Her work includes studies of the effects of federal and state policy initiatives, including an ongoing evaluation of Massachusetts's 2006 health reform initiative—which provided the template for the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—and new evaluations of the ACA for the US Department of Health and Human Services and for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She directs Urban's Health Reform Monitoring Survey, a cutting-edge Internet survey that provides rapid-cycle feedback on the ACA. Long also works on several projects for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that evaluate multiple state demonstrations. Her papers have appeared in American Economic Review, Annals of Internal Medicine, Health Affairs, Health Economics, Health Services Research, Inquiry and Medical Care, and Journal of the American Medical Association. Long was awarded the 2012 Health Services Research Impact Award for her Massachusetts evaluation work and the 2015 Article-of-the Year Award from AcademyHealth.