Erika Poethig is vice president and chief innovation officer at the Urban Institute. She leads the Research to Action Lab, which is an innovation hub serving decisionmakers and creative thinkers eager to effect social change.

Before joining Urban, Poethig was acting assistant secretary for policy, development, and research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. During her tenure in the Obama administration, she was also deputy assistant secretary for policy development and was a leading architect of the White House Council for Strong Cities and Strong Communities. As associate director for housing at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, she developed grantmaking strategies focused on rental housing policy and research and research on how housing matters. In the 1990s, she was assistant commissioner for policy, resource, and program development at the City of Chicago’s Department of Housing and developed Mayor Richard Daley’s campaign to combat predatory lending, prevent foreclosures, and stabilize communities. Previously, she was associate project director of the Metropolis Project, which produced the Metropolis 2020 agenda for regional leadership around the major issues faced by metropolitan Chicago. Poethig serves on the boards of the Low Income Investment Fund, Mercy Housing, and the College of Wooster.

She was a Phi Beta Kappa member at the College of Wooster and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Vienna, and she has an MA with honors in public policy from the University of Chicago.

Molly Scott is a principal research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. For 16 years, Scott has studied Americans' experience of poverty and the effectiveness of programs and policies on the ground. In recent years, her work has focused on identifying the underlying structural issues that impede young people from completing their education, low-income adults from succeeding in the labor market, private-sector firms from adopting "good jobs strategies," and nonprofits and government agencies from designing and implementing approaches that achieve results. Scott has also collaborated with organizations to use people-centered design to develop new approaches to structural problems, put systems in place to pilot and test these approaches, and disseminate lessons learned to practitioners and policymakers.

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. She serves on a Council of Economic Advisors for the Controller of the State of California and a National Academy of Sciences panel on the economic and fiscal consequences of immigration, and she was on the DC Tax Revision Commission in 2013. In addition to her position at Urban, Rueben is an adjunct fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC).

Before joining Urban, Rueben was a research fellow at the PPIC. She has served as an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute and the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley; as a visiting scholar at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank; and as a member of the executive board of the American Education Finance Association.

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.

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.