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.

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.

Sara McTarnaghan is a 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.

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.