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.

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.

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.

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.