Heather Sandstrom is a principal research associate in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute. Her research focuses on early childhood development and public programs that support the well-being of low-income children and families, such as Head Start/Early Head Start, child care subsidies, and maternal and child home visiting. Her most recent projects have included diverse populations of families who are immigrants or are limited English proficient. She has experience combining qualitative and quantitative methods and has managed several complex longitudinal studies.

Before joining Urban, Sandstrom worked as an independent early childhood research consultant, serving organizations and institutions around the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, including Child Trends and the Maryland State Department of Education. In 2009, she was awarded a Fulbright Research Grant from the Institute of International Education to study the characteristics and quality of a publicly funded universal preschool program in Seville, Spain.

Sandstrom has a PhD in human development with a certification in measurement, statistics, and evaluation from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Hamutal Bernstein is a senior research associate in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where her research focuses on immigration and integration, workforce development and education, and program evaluation. She has wide expertise in mixed-methods research, including original survey development, secondary data analysis, and qualitative data collection and analysis. She is a principal investigator on the Annual Survey of Refugees and Survey Redesign for the US Department of Health and Human Services. Her other areas of research focus on immigrant upskilling, immigrant inclusion at the local level, and other human services topics. Her evaluation and survey experience includes the systems change analysis of the National Implementation Evaluation of the Health Profession Opportunity Grants program, evaluation of the Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program, and evaluation of the LRNG out-of-school youth learning initiative. Before joining Urban, Bernstein was a program officer at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, managing public opinion survey research in the United States and Europe. This position followed her work on global and US migration research as a research associate at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University and as a migration consultant to international organizations. She has conducted fieldwork in English and Spanish in the United States and abroad, and she speaks fluent French. Bernstein received her BA in international relations from Brown University and her PhD in government from Georgetown University.

Gina Adams, a senior fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute, is a national expert on factors that shape the affordability, quality, and supply of child care/early education services, and the ability of low-income families to benefit from them. Since the mid-1980s, she has worked on a range of child care and early education programs, including child care subsidies, Head Start/Early Head Start, state prekindergarten, two-generation models, and quality initiatives. She led seminal research on how families, providers, and agency staff experience the subsidy system that supported state and federal efforts to create subsidy systems that are family-friendly and fair to providers.

Adams codirects Urban’s Kids in Context initiative. Her current research interests include working across program silos to address challenges that instability and insecurity create for children’s healthy development, helping states simplify their child care systems to align them with SNAP or Medicaid, examining the intersection between child care and workforce development strategies, exploring factors that affect whether children of immigrants participate in state prekindergarten programs, examining absenteeism in early childhood programs, and assessing two-generational models. She has led major multistate or multisite qualitative studies and mixed-method studies. She also has extensive experience in public speaking, technical assistance, and publishing for a wide-ranging audience.

Before joining Urban in 1999, Adams directed child care research at the Children’s Defense Fund and worked as a child care teacher for infants and as a home visitor for low-income Latino families.