Immigrant & Immigration Policy Experts

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Heather Sandstrom

Principal Research Associate

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.
Molly M. Scott

Principal Research Associate

Molly M. Scott is a principal research associate in the Center for Income and Benefits Policy. Her work centers around the systems changes needed to ensure that all people are valued for their skills and abilities, can signal them effectively in the labor market, and enjoy a good return on their investments in education and hard work. Recent research has focused on redesigning mainstream high school to be more supportive of young people with adult responsibilities, incentivizing postsecondary institutions to take more competency-based approaches to education, and evaluating initiatives to promote broad-based credential transparency. In addition, Scott has collaborated with employers to document forward-thinking practices in hiring and advancement for frontline workers that promise to be good for people and business.
Erica Greenberg

Senior Research Associate

Erica Greenberg is a senior research associate in the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute. Her research spans early childhood and K–12 education, focusing on programs and policies like public prekindergarten, Head Start, child care subsidies, and home visiting. She also investigates the causes, consequences, and measurement of educational inequality.

Greenberg’s recent projects assess quality, access, and funding at federal, state, and local levels. She leads studies of public preschool expansion and early childhood program participation among low-income immigrant families. In K–12, she is conducting new work on measures of student poverty and links between public investments and children’s educational outcomes. She has experience with quantitative and qualitative methods and complex data collection and analysis.

Before joining Urban, Greenberg was an intern in the US Department of Education Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development and a prekindergarten teacher in Washington, DC.

Greenberg holds a BA from Yale University. She received her MA in political science and her PhD in education policy from Stanford University.
Dulce Gonzalez

Research Associate

Dulce Gonzalez is a research associate in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute. She forms part of a team working on the Urban Institute’s Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey. Gonzalez conducts quantitative and qualitative research focused primarily on the social safety net, immigration, and barriers to health care access. Her work has also focused on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on nonelderly adults and their families. Before joining Urban, Gonzalez worked at the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families and at the nonprofit organization Maternal and Child Health Access. Gonzalez holds a BA in economics from California State University, Long Beach, and a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University.
Cary Lou

Research Associate

Cary Lou is a research associate in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute, focusing on policies related to poverty and opportunity. Before joining Urban, Lou worked on state higher education and workforce issues at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

Lou holds a BA in history and geography from Dartmouth College and an MPP from Georgetown University.
Hamutal Bernstein

Principal Research Associate

Hamutal Bernstein is a principal research associate in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where she leads Urban's program on immigrants and immigration. Her research focuses on the well-being and integration of immigrant and refugee families and workers. Her areas of expertise include immigration and integration, workforce development and training, and human services. She is a mixed-methods researcher, with experience in policy analysis, program monitoring and evaluation, technical assistance, design of qualitative and survey data collection, and qualitative and quantitative data analysis. She is a principal investigator on the Annual Survey of Refugees for the US Department of Health and Human Services and is conducting survey and qualitative research to understand immigrant families' access to safety net supports.

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

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.
Sara McTarnaghan

Senior Research Associate

Sara McTarnaghan is a senior research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where she researches urban resilience, affordable housing, and nonprofit capacity building. She has conducted evaluations for federally funded initiatives such as Strong Cities, Strong Communities. She is research deputy for the monitoring and evaluation of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program to measure municipal governance and planning resilience outcomes in participating cities. McTarnaghan led a comprehensive evidence review of housing policy and practice in Latin America and the Caribbean for Habitat for Humanity as an input to the United Nations Habitat III conference in 2016. She is the lead urban research specialist on an evidence-based learning program for the US Agency for International Development to inform urban programming.

In addition to her research and evaluation portfolio, McTarnaghan provides training and technical assistance to nonprofit organizations on data use and evaluation. Since 2015, she has managed Urban’s efforts to provide technical assistance to US Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhoods grantees. Additionally, she plays a leadership role on Urban’s Measure4Change initiative to build performance management and evaluation capacity among DC and Baltimore-area nonprofits through intensive technical assistance, curricula development, grantmaking, and peer-network development.

Before joining Urban, McTarnaghan worked at the nonprofit Techo in Santiago, Chile, on regional housing and community development programs. She holds a BA from the George Washington University and an MS in community and regional planning and an MA in Latin American studies from the University of Texas at Austin.
Kim S. Rueben

Sol Price Fellow

Project director, State and Local Finance Initiative

Kim Rueben is the Sol Price fellow and director of the State and Local Finance Initiative at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. Rueben is an expert on state and local public finance and the economics of education. Her work examines issues of state and local public finance and focuses on state budget and tax issues, intergovernmental relations, fiscal institutions, and the economics of education, including federal and state financing of both K–12 and postsecondary education and how decisions affect different individuals across states.

In addition to her position at the Urban Institute, Rueben is an adjunct fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), serves on the board of the National Tax Association, the Washington, DC, Revenue Estimation Advisory Group, and as an advisor to Let’s Get Set, a purpose-driven fintech start-up. She works closely with state officials and has served on state tax advisory boards including in California and Washington, DC, and has testified before congressional and state legislative committees. She was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel that examined The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration and was on the executive board of the American Education Finance Association.

Before joining Urban, Rueben was a research fellow at the PPIC.

Rueben received a BS in applied math-economics from Brown University, an MS in economics from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.