Immigrant & Immigration Policy Experts

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Erika C. Poethig

Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer

Institute Fellow

Erika Poethig is vice president and chief innovation officer at the Urban Institute. She leads the Research to Action Lab, an innovation hub serving decisionmakers and creative thinkers eager to effect social change. The Lab draws on the breadth and depth of Urban’s research insights to test new strategies; develop cutting-edge tools, programs, and trainings; and provide strategic advice to public, philanthropic, nonprofit, and private-sector leaders.

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. At the MacArthur Foundation, she was associate director for housing. She was also assistant commissioner for policy, resource, and program development at the City of Chicago's Department of Housing. In the 1990s, she 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 the metropolitan Chicago area. Poethig serves on the boards of Mercy Housing and The College of Wooster.

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

Senior Research Associate

Molly Scott is a senior 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.
Jonathan Schwabish

Senior Fellow

Jonathan Schwabish is a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute. He also specializes in data visualization and presentation design as a member of the communications team. His research agenda includes earnings and income inequality, immigration, disability insurance, retirement security, data measurement, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Schwabish is considered a leader in the data visualization field and is a leading voice for clarity and accessibility in research. He has written on various aspects of how to best visualize data, including technical aspects of creation, design best practices, and how to communicate social science research in more accessible ways. He was named a “visualization thought leader” by AllAnalytics in 2013 and speaks frequently on data visualization, open data, and data use in organizations.

Schwabish teaches data visualization and presentation skills at Georgetown University, American University, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is also founder of PolicyViz, a small consulting firm that helps clients improve how they work with and communicate data and analysis. He also hosts the PolicyViz Podcast, which focuses on data, open data, and data visualization. He is author of a new book about presentation design and techniques, Better Presentations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks.
Kim S. Rueben

Senior Fellow

Project director, State and Local Finance Initiative

Kim Rueben, a senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute, is an expert on state and local public finance and the economics of education. Her research examines state and local tax policy, fiscal institutions, state and local budgets, issues of education finance, and public-sector labor markets. Rueben directs the State and Local Finance Initiative. Her current projects include work on state budget shortfalls, financing options for California, the fiscal health of cities, and examining higher education tax credits and grants. 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.
Heather Sandstrom

Senior Research Associate

Heather Sandstrom is a senior 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

Senior Research Associate

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.
Devlin Hanson

Senior Research Associate

Devlin Hanson is a senior research associate in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute. She is a labor economist, specializing in rigorous impact evaluations, whose research focuses on housing, child welfare, and veterans. She leads the impact study of the Denver Supportive Housing Social Impact Bond, a randomized controlled trial (RCT) evaluation of supportive housing for people who are homeless and cycle in and out of the criminal justice system. She also leads impact evaluations of two multisite RCTs: one of supportive housing for homeless families involved in child welfare and one of a high school internship program. In addition, Hanson leads an evaluation of the Education and Training Voucher program, which provides educational vouchers for youth aging out of foster care, and she is working on a project that seeks to build the evidence base in child welfare through rigorous evaluation. Hanson is currently working on an evaluation of the Homeless Veterans’ Reintegration Program and previously led an implementation and feasibility study of an evaluation of the United Services Military Apprenticeship Program.

Hanson also has experience as an evaluator in pay for success. In addition to her work on the Denver Supportive Housing pay for success project, she is designing two rigorous pay for success evaluations and providing technical assistance on impact evaluations of supportive housing programs in the pay for success context. She received her PhD from Boston College.
Gina Adams

Senior Fellow

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.