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Elaine Baruwa has more than 15 years of experience conducting program evaluations, economic evaluations, and working on pricing and costing policies and tools for the financing of health services and health systems in Nigeria, Haiti, Ethiopia, China, Bangladesh and other low-income countries.

Lauren Olsho is a senior health economist and evaluator with expertise in random assignment, quasi-experimental evaluation methods, economic modeling methodology, and advanced statistical and econometric analysis.Olsho’s primary research interests are in health, nutrition and health behaviors in vulnerable populations – including the elderly, the poor, program participants, minorities, arrestees and at-risk youth.Olsho recently served as principal investigator on a cluster random assignment evaluation of the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality On-Time Falls Prevention Initiative, a clinical decision support intervention to reduce falls in long-term care settings.

Jason Brinkley, Ph.D., is a biostatistician, data scientist and health researcher who leads the Research Design and Analytics team in Abt’s Data Science, Surveys and Enabling Technologies division. Brinkley has expertise in a wide range of analytic methods, and he specializes in machine learning, customized data visualizations, maps and dash-boarding. Brinkley balances research time between examining theoretical ways to assess the impact of medical interventions on public health and developing best practices for using statistical software. A member of the American Statistical Association, AcademyHealth, and the American Association for Public Opinion Research, he also serves on the executive board of the Southeast SAS Users Group.

Anna Winoto has more than 20 years of experience leading and managing multi-disciplinary teams on complex development programs in Indonesia. Her areas of expertise include public health and nutrition, social protection, child protection, decentralized service delivery, and community-led development.  She is a skilled facilitator of multi-stakeholder collaboration. She has worked with the national governments of Australia and Indonesia and with UNICEF.

Dr. Michael Plotzke is a senior health economist with expertise in the area of Medicare payment policy, the organization of healthcare providers and quality measurement. His work typically involves the analysis of large datasets such as Medicare claims, assessment and enrollment data. Dr. Plotzke serves as principal investigator for multiple projects with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.  On the “Home Health Prospective Payment System and Hospice: Analysis Support and Monitoring” project, Dr. Plotzke leads a team of researchers in analyzing trends in Medicare hospice and home health usage and constructing large-scale payment reform options for both benefits.  Dr. Plotzke also leads the “Evaluation of the Medicare Care Choices Model” project that evaluates a new payment model for end-of-life care that is being tested with 141 hospice providers.  This project involves analysis of existing administrative data and collection of new data through surveys of caregivers, surveys of hospice providers and in-depth case studies of hospice providers participating in the model.

Eric Tischler brings almost 30 years of experience as a professional storyteller to Abt, where he works to tell the company’s story to clients, media, and the just-plain-curious. Besides covering climate, environment, housing and homelessness, equity, and more at Abt, Tischler produces The Intersect podcast, connecting the dots between Abt experts across disciplines and the complex problems they’re tackling.

Kate Greene is a project director with extensive experience in planning and implementing complex donor-funded health programs in health systems, global health security, human resources for health, and HIV/AIDS. Her diverse experience includes managing and overseeing health professional regulation and accreditation activities in Cote d’Ivoire, Eswatini, Haiti, and Jordan; designing and managing Ebola preparedness efforts in Guinea; and providing technical oversight to Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) initiatives in Cote d’Ivoire, including the development of the country’s first National Health Security Plan.

Olga Zues, a health-system and financing specialist, has 20 years of experience in international development. She focuses on the design and implementation of comprehensive reform strategies to strengthen health systems and public finance management. Her expertise includes benefits design to move towards universal health coverage, arrangements to support efficiency gains and service delivery improvements, innovative payment mechanisms, sustainability strategies, and institutional development. She has worked with the World Health Organisation (WHO), the World Bank, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the UK Department for International Development – now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office – and numerous ministries of health, finance, justice, and education.

Meghan Henry is a social science researcher with over 15 years of experience in public policy and program evaluation, specifically in the fields of housing and homelessness and the intersection of homelessness and education. Henry has extensive experience leading evaluations, including large data collection efforts, conducting qualitative data collection, data analysis, and outcome evaluations. As project director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, she has considerable experience synthesizing large amounts of information to make the data accessible and actionable for federal, state, local, and philanthropic clients.

Dr. Cara Jackson is an evaluation expert with decades of experience designing and managing evaluations of education programs. She has extensive experience with a broad range of evaluation approaches, including quasi-experimental designs, qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis methods, and systematic evidence reviews. Jackson is a former pre-kindergarten and kindergarten teacher, and her work builds on that experience. It has included evaluations of teacher preparation programs, charter school program replication and expansion grants, and a variety of district-level educational programs. She also has developed a framework for democratizing the development of evidence to incorporate a greater variety of perspectives in evaluation. Jackson is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles on a range of topics, including a historical writing intervention and performance pay for educators. She has co-edited two books, one on teacher preparation program design and outcomes and another on assessment education. She has delivered over 50 conference presentations and invited talks in both academic and practice settings and has appeared on numerous podcasts. She currently serves as the president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, on the board of the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, and on the Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research Policymakers Council.