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Meryl Finkel leads Abt Global’s Housing and Communities Practice, overseeing large-scale housing; community and economic development; and social policy data collection, analysis and technical assistance projects. Clients include the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Corporation for National and Community Service, as well as foundations and state and local governments.

Dr. Tiffany G. Harris is an epidemiologist with over 20 years of experience working in public health. She has overseen surveillance, program implementation and management, monitoring and evaluation, informatics, and data analysis and dissemination at the local, federal, and international level. She focuses on HIV, tuberculosis, COVID-19, and other infectious and non-infectious diseases.

Dr. Hannah Thomas, a sociologist and geographer, brings over 20 years of experience in qualitative and mixed methods research addressing housing and economic inequality. Her work has ranged across the fields of housing, guaranteed income, workforce development, the racial wealth gap, community development, mortgages, and asset building. Dr. Thomas has worked with a range of clients from federal agencies such as the departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and Health and Human Services, to cities, states, and non-profits. She brings a participant and implementation orientation towards her research and helps produce methodological solutions in service of the end users of programs and policies.

Since 2011, Dr. Anna Jefferson has spent her career in policy research creatively and rigorously applying ethnographic, participatory, and community-based methods to make policy research more person-centered. She is a subject matter expert in guaranteed income, inequality, consumer finance, and U.S. housing policy, and a fluent Spanish speaker. She co-leads Abt’s portfolio of guaranteed income evaluations and has worked extensively with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Housing and Urban Development, New York City Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, and a range of philanthropic clients. Dr. Jefferson is an experienced principal investigator, project director and task leader, and co-leads Abt's qualitative and mixed methods affinity group. 

Donna DeMarco has more than 30 years of experience successfully designing and managing research studies on a variety of federal, state, and local programs targeted to lower income individuals and families. She has experience with program evaluation and policy analysis in a wide variety of fields, including asset building, community and economic development, housing, family development, education, job training, and community services. She has expertise in the implementation of qualitative research and data collection for large-scale, multi-modal, experimental research projects.

Lori Hunter is a Project Management Professional and a Certified Scrum Master with 20 years of experience working in systems analysis, functional requirements analysis, user-centered design and user experience, database administration and design, and web design and development. Her projects and experience represent a range of complexities, including administrative and evaluation data collection and reporting systems analysis and visualization, clearinghouses, websites, technical assistance tracking, evaluation data collection, interactive online tools and libraries, communities of practice, and Section 508 compliance. She has been the lead project manager for several large CMMI-3 IT implementations. Her responsibilities have included directing project team personnel; managing scope, schedule, budget, and risk; ensuring contract compliance; and serving as the interface with the customer and customer stakeholders.

Francoise Armand is a portfolio manager and senior private sector adviser providing technical leadership and support in international health.She is responsible for supporting Abt’s private-sector health portfolio, and oversaw the DFID-supported Zambia Scaling Up Family Planning project. Armand has expertise in the area of market-based strategies for health, including total market initiatives under the USAID-funded Strengthening Health Outcomes through the Private Sector (SHOPS) project. She has more than 15 years of program management expertise in global health, with a focus on family planning and reproductive health, HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and maternal and child health.

Meghan Hendricksen, Ph.D., MPH has more than a decade of healthcare research and project management experience, with expertise in gerontology, long-term care, and discrimination in health care settings. She has extensive experience conducting qualitative and quantitative research for federal, state, and nonprofit clients, ranging from interviewing nursing home staff and residents to conducting complex quantitative analyses of large datasets like the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Her skills include data and team management across multiple complex projects, developing data collection instruments, as well as the production of research protocols and training research teams.

Marianne El-Khoury is a seasoned manager of global health programs. At Abt, she has held senior management and technical roles on USAID-funded projects in health systems strengthening and private sector health. She has also led research and evaluation studies in family planning and reproductive health, maternal and child health, and health financing.El-Khoury is currently the Deputy Director of the $209 million Local Health System Sustainability (LHSS) Project, USAID’s flagship project in integrated health systems strengthening. She provides overall leadership, management, and oversight of project activities across more than 20 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. She also serves as the Global Development representative for Abt’s Institutional Review Board (IRB).

Midori de Habich brings 25 years of experience leading and implementing development activities in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), including two years serving as Minister of Health, and 10 years as a Chief of Party of USAID-funded projects in her native country of Peru.de Habich is the technical director for the Abt-led, USAID-financed Local Health System Sustainability Project (LHSS), which supports government efforts to improve access to quality care for poor, underserved, and socially excluded populations in LMICs. de Habich helps country teams to think creatively about new solutions and approaches. She ensures that the project’s collaborative approach to working with local government partners is applied wherever LHSS works. She also oversees the global technical expert pool, coordinates cross-project learning, and is responsible for the quality assurance of technical approaches and major project deliverables.