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Featured Experts

Gina Adams

Senior Fellow

Gina Adams is a senior fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Resources, and Population and directs the Urban Institute’s Low-Income Working Families and Kids in Context initiatives. Her research spans a range of issues that affect the well-being of children and families. She is a national expert on child care and early education, focusing on the broad range of policies and programs affecting the affordability, quality, and supply of child care and early education, and factors affecting the ability of families with lower-incomes to access and participate in these services. Adams led seminal work on how parents, providers, and caseworkers experience these programs, which helped inform the “family friendly” and “provider friendly” provisions of the 2014 Reauthorization of the Child Care and Development Fund. In recent years, she has broadened her focus to encompass a wider range of policies, including breaking down siloes between child care and early childhood policies and other systems that support child and family well-being, as well as understanding the range of supports needed to stabilize children and families.

Adams has worked closely with a wide range of policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and other stakeholders. She has published extensively and presented to audiences ranging from child care providers and parents to Congress. Before joining Urban, she directed child care research at the Children’s Defense Fund, analyzed children’s issues at the Congressional Budget Office, taught infants and toddlers in a child care center, and conducted home visits with Latino families with low incomes.
Megan Gallagher

Senior Research Associate

Megan Gallagher’s research focuses on how schools, housing, and community programs affect the lives of low-income children and families. She has conducted research on housing and education collaborations designed to boost educational outcomes, like the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Choice Neighborhoods Initiative and Seattle’s Housing and Education Partnership. She has also conducted evaluations of Washington, DC, area–based education initiatives, such as the DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative, Kindred, and TNI @ School.

Gallagher is skilled in quantitative and qualitative research methods. In addition to her research and evaluation work, she also conducts training and technical assistance for nonprofit organizations that are US Department of Education Promise Neighborhoods grantees. She recently completed a results leadership training to enhance her capacity to support grantees with data-driven decisionmaking. Before joining Urban in 2005, Gallagher studied the impacts of welfare programs on adult, child, and family well-being at Child Trends. While there, she conducted research on child well-being and employment among low-income mothers.
C. Eugene Steuerle

Institute Fellow and Richard B. Fisher Chair

Cofounder, Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy, and Opportunity and Ownership initiative; codirector, Tax Policy and Charities initiative

Eugene Steuerle is an Institute fellow and the Richard B. Fisher chair at the Urban Institute. Among past positions, he was deputy assistant secretary of the US Department of the Treasury for Tax Analysis (1987–89), president of the National Tax Association (2001–02), codirector of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, chair of the 1999 Technical Panel advising Social Security on its methods and assumptions, and chair of the 2015–16 National Academy of Sciences Committee on Advancing the Power of Economic Evidence to Inform Investments in Children, Youth, and Families. Between 1984 and 1986, he was the economic coordinator and original organizer of the Treasury’s tax reform effort.

Steuerle is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of 18 books, including Dead Men Ruling, Nonprofits and Government (3rd edition), Contemporary US Tax Policy (2nd edition), and Advancing the Power of Economic Evidence to Inform Investments in Children, Youth, and Families.

He is a founder and chair emeritus of ACT for Alexandria, a community foundation, and is or has been an elected, appointed, advisory panel, or board member for the Congressional Budget Office, Comptroller General of the United States, the Joint Committee on Taxation, Venture Philanthropy Partners, and the National Center on Philanthropy and the Law (chair).

Steuerle received the first Bruce Davie–Albert Davis Public Service Award from the National Tax Association in 2005, distinguished or outstanding alumnus awards from the University of Dayton and St. Xavier High School, and the TIAA-CREF Paul Samuelson award for his book Dead Men Ruling.
Mary K. Cunningham

Vice President, Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy

Mary Cunningham is vice president for metropolitan housing and communities policy at the Urban Institute, where her research focuses on homelessness, housing, concentrated poverty, and efforts to improve family self-sufficiency and overall well-being among low-income families. She has expertise in several US Department of Housing and Urban Development homelessness and assisted housing programs, including permanent supportive housing, transitional housing, emergency shelter, Housing Choice Vouchers, Family Self-Sufficiency, HOPE VI, and the Moving to Opportunity demonstration. She directs studies examining the impact of housing vouchers on child welfare involvement, the impact of supportive housing on high-need families in the child welfare system, and a homelessness prevention program for at-risk veterans.

From 2005 to 2008, Cunningham launched and directed the Homeless Research Institute, the research and education arm of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. She also cochaired a research council on homelessness comprising nationally recognized academics and policy researchers. She also authored numerous reports, including A Research Agenda for Ending Homelessness and Homelessness Counts.

Cunningham has an MPP from Georgetown University.
Susan J. Popkin

Institute Fellow

Director, HOST Initiative

Susan J. Popkin is director of the Urban Institute’s Housing Opportunities and Services Together (HOST) Initiative and an Institute fellow in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center. A nationally recognized expert on public and assisted housing policy, Popkin directs a research program that uses community engagement and community-based participatory approaches to explore new strategies for improving outcomes for families, and she conducts evaluations of complex community-based interventions. Popkin is the author of No Simple Solutions: Transforming Public Housing in Chicago; coauthor of the award-winning Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty; lead author of The Hidden War: Crime and the Tragedy of Public Housing in Chicago; and coauthor of Public Housing Transformation: The Legacy of Segregation.
Elaine Maag

Principal Research Associate

Elaine Maag is a principal research associate in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where she studies income support programs for low-income families and children.

Before joining Urban, Maag worked at the Internal Revenue Service and Government Accountability Office as a Presidential Management Fellow. She has advised congressional staff on the taxation of families with children, higher education incentives in the tax code, and work incentives in the tax code. Maag codirected the creation of the Net Income Change Calculator, a tool that allows users to understand the trade-offs between tax and transfer benefits, and changes in earnings or marital status.

Maag holds an MS in public policy analysis from the University of Rochester.
Sarah Benatar

Principal Research Associate

Sarah Benatar is a principal research associate in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Her research investigates how public policies affect vulnerable populations’ health outcomes, access to care, use of services, and enrollment in coverage programs, with a particular focus on maternal and child health.

Benatar has led and participated in several projects focused on maternal and child health, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and Medicaid, combining qualitative and quantitative methods to achieve the richest findings. She is working on a national evaluation of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Strong Start for Mothers and Newborns enhanced prenatal care program; she leads the evaluation’s process measurement and monitoring task and is a senior member of the case study team. Benatar is also deputy project director for a multiyear evaluation of a home visitation and community-based program intervention in Los Angeles, aimed at improving health and developmental outcomes for low-income mothers and children. She is coleading a study to examine the impact of the Affordable Care Act on women’s preventive health care service use.

Additional recent work includes an evaluation of ongoing efforts to redesign the county clinic system in San Mateo County, California, an evaluation of a physician incentive program in Los Angeles, a review of recent family planning research, and a feasibility assessment of a universal vaccine-purchasing program for children in New York State.

Benatar holds a PhD in public policy from George Washington University.
Brigette Courtot

Principal Research Associate

Brigette Courtot is a principal research associate in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where she focuses on maternal and child health, women’s health, and access to care for underserved populations. Her current and recent projects include national evaluations of the Maternal Opioid Misuse model, the Strong Start for Mothers and Newborns program, and the State Innovation Models program.

Courtot also directed a mixed-methods project on reproductive health care access and an evaluation design for a multi-state contraceptive access program. Courtot is an expert on Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program policies related to eligibility, enrollment, and managed care and has studied Affordable Care Act implementation extensively. Her interests extend across public policy areas, and she has been involved in Urban Institute cross-center projects such as a study of how communities have responded to the public charge rule, retention in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the evaluation of Work Support Strategies, an initiative to streamline the delivery of key economic supports for low-income working families.

Before joining Urban, Courtot was senior policy analyst for health and reproductive rights at the National Women’s Law Center, where she examined women’s access to care, insurance coverage for reproductive health services, implementation of the federal health reform law, and how various public policies affect women’s health outcomes. She holds an MPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she concentrated on population and family health, and completed a final capstone project on organizational models of maternity care.
Ian Hill

Senior Fellow

Project Director of the Strong Start for Mothers and Newborns Evaluation; Project Director of the Best Start LA Pilot Community Evaluation

Ian Hill is a senior fellow in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute. He has more than 25 years of experience directing evaluation and technical assistance projects on health insurance programs for disadvantaged children and families. He is a nationally recognized qualitative researcher with extensive experience developing case studies of health program implementation and conducting focus groups with health care consumers, providers, and administrators. Hill directs the Strong Start for Mothers and Newborns Evaluation, which measures the impact of innovative prenatal care strategies on birth outcomes. He also leads various qualitative assessments of the Affordable Care Act’s implementation, focusing on outreach and enrollment strategies and provider access. Hill led the qualitative components of two congressionally mandated evaluations of the Children’s Health Insurance Program and directed Urban’s work on the Insuring America’s Children evaluation and Covering Kids and Families evaluation.

For 10 years, Hill has worked in his hometown of Los Angeles, initially evaluating First 5 LA’s Healthy Kids Program, a universal coverage program targeting Latino immigrant children. He is currently evaluating its Best Start LA initiative to improve the well-being and development of children from birth to age 5.

Before joining Urban, Hill was the associate director of Health Systems Research, Inc., a senior analyst with the National Governors Association, and a presidential management fellow with the Department of Health and Human Services.

Hill did his undergraduate work at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received MAs in public administration and social work from Syracuse University.