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Hanna Kovalova is a program manager with 15 years of experience managing humanitarian aid and development programs in Ukraine, with a recent focus on the eastern part of the country ravaged by the war with Russia. She has worked with international organizations, including the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and the United Nations, as well as social enterprises. Kovalova’s work with vulnerable populations has centered around gender equality, non-discrimination, conflict sensitivity, and social inclusion. She has extensive experience with monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning approaches; program management; and communication strategies in public health, mental health, and community stabilisation.

Shelley Martin is a sustainable development advisor with a background in women and youth empowerment social entrepreneurship and innovation. Her work has engaged local and global organizations in numerous sectors across 15+ countries, spanning agriculture, land rights, finance, entrepreneurship, clean energy, STEM, infrastructure, manufacturing and garment and consumer goods.

Dr. Zarrar Khan brings over a decade of experience in climate and energy modeling and advancing sustainable energy solutions, climate mitigation, and resilience initiatives worldwide. He has worked in the U.S., Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia to help transform groundbreaking research into tangible global impact. Khan has played pivotal roles in developing national climate strategies, enhancing local capacities, and fostering lasting stakeholder relationships. His collaborative efforts to address complex challenges include working with the World Bank, Green Climate Fund, World Resources Institute, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Department of Energy (DOE), Department of State (DOS), and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Khan’s scholarly work has been cited over 600 times, demonstrating his impact on global climate resilience and policy development.

Dr. Matthew Finster is a principal researcher with 15 years of experience working in education and educational policy research. His expertise lies in providing technical assistance on educational research and program implementation, which often focuses on improving educator effectiveness and student outcomes. He has significant experience working with federal education grantees, state education agencies, local education agencies, and schools on building their capacity to implement their Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plans. He is also the author of numerous articles and technical reports centered around education and human capital management that have appeared in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, Journal of Education Human Resources, and other notable publications.

Dr. Rebecca McGill-Wilkinson is an education researcher with two decades of experience designing and implementing evaluation and research projects. She has extensive expertise in a broad range of impact and implementation evaluation approaches, including quasi-experimental designs, randomized control trials, survey design and analysis methods, systematic evidence reviews, and measure development. Her work includes evaluations of federal education policies, including the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA). With a background in developmental psychology, she has contributed to systematic evidence reviews for both the Administration of Children and Families and the U.S. Department of Education. McGill-Wilkinson is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on a range of topics and has delivered over 40 conference presentations and invited talks in academic and practice settings and is a prolific blog author.

Katharine Witgert is a health policy researcher with 20 years of public health and health care policy experience. Witgert manages research and analysis of health system innovations, conducting program evaluations for federal clients, including design, implementation, and reporting of findings. She provides technical assistance to state officials, primarily in the areas of Medicaid reforms and building Medicaid agency partnerships with public health, behavioral health, and social services programs.

Sarah Kozyn is an international agriculture and economic growth specialist with more than 12 years of experience designing, managing, monitoring, and evaluating donor-funded programs focused on agriculture and market systems development, resilience, nutrition, and trade. Her work at Abt has spanned projects in sub-Saharan Africa (Uganda, Ghana), the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt), and South and Southeast Asia (Bangladesh, Cambodia). 

Beth Boulay has 15 years of experience using robust evaluation tools and methods to generate evidence practitioners need to make critical decisions. Her work includes designing and conducting research aimed at identifying effective education interventions that promise to improve student achievement and education outcomes. She has led large-scale, complex evaluations that use a range of research methodologies to assess the impact of policies and programs. Boulay also provides evaluation technical assistance to help increase local evaluators’ capacity to produce rigorous evidence of program effectiveness and implementation fidelity.

Lisanne F. Brown has more than 20 years of experience in public health evaluation and research and a background in epidemiologic and program evaluation methods. She has worked on numerous evaluation and applied research studies for local, state and federal agencies. Her areas of expertise include maternal and child health, health care access, integration of primary care and behavioral health, community-centered health homes, social determinants of health, mixed methods evaluation design and implementation, survey design, and evaluation capacity building.

Nicole Keane, MSN, RN, CPHQ has an extensive clinical and research background in healthcare quality improvement, measure development, team-building and formative evaluation in post-acute and primary care settings. Her focus is providing technical assistance to healthcare systems and clinicians to drive quality improvement through learning and implementing the skills of measure development, implementation, benchmarking, analysis, and report writing.