Urban Institute Affiliated Scholars include academics and other experts with whom we have close, ongoing relationships. While not members of the Urban Institute staff, they regularly join us on proposals and projects, help us develop new areas of work, and participate on our research teams.
Alan Abramson Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy Alan Abramson is a professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University and director of Mason’s Center for Nonprofit Management, Philanthropy, and Policy. He previously served as a program director at the Aspen Institute and as a research associate at the Urban Institute. Abramson's work has twice won awards from the American Political Science Association.
Rosanne Altshuler
Tax Policy Center
Rosanne Altshuler is an associate professor in the Economics Department at Rutgers University. Previously, she was codirector of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, served as senior economist to President George W. Bush's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform, and acted as a special advisor to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
Burt S. Barnow
Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population
Burt S. Barnow is the Amsterdam Professor of Public Service at George Washington University in the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration. Before that, he served as the Associate Director for Research at Johns Hopkins University's Institute for Policy Studies for 18 years. He also co-edited Improving the Odds: Increasing the Effectiveness of Publicly Funded Training, an Urban Institute Press book.
Evelyn Brody
Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy
Evelyn Brody is a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology, where she teaches courses on tax and nonprofit law. She previously worked in private practice and with the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Tax Policy. Professor Brody is the Reporter of the American Law Institute's ongoing project on Principles of the Law of Nonprofit Organizations.
Len Burman
Tax Policy Center
Video Interview
Len Burman is Daniel Patrick Moynihan Professor of Public Affairs at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, a research associate with the Center for Policy Research and the National Bureau of Economic Research, an associate editor of Public Finance Review, and vice president of the National Tax Association.Previously, he was director and cofounder of the Tax Policy Center, deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis at the U.S. Treasury, and senior analyst at the CBO.
Marti Burt
Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population
Marti Burt is an experienced researcher in issues relating to homelessness and emergency assistance, teen pregnancy and parenting, social services policy research, and evaluation. She directed the Social Services Research Program at Urban Institute for 15 years and continues to work with the Institute's Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population. Her most recent book, Repairing the U.S. Social Safety Net, coauthored with Demetra Smith Nightingale, was published by the Urban Institute Press in 2009.
Joseph Cordes
Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy and Tax Policy Center
Video Interview
Joseph J. Cordes is George Washington University's associate director of the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration and professor of economics, public policy and public administration, and international affairs. Previously, he was a Brookings economic policy fellow in the Office of Tax Policy, U.S. Department of the Treasury and served as a senior economist on the Treasury's tax reform project in 1984. He also coedited Encyclopedia of Taxation and Tax Policy (Urban Institute Press), now in its second edition.
Claudia Coulton
Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center
Claudia Coulton is the Lillian F. Harris Professor of Urban Social Research in the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. She is also codirector of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, which she founded in 1988. Dr. Coulton helped launch Urban Institute's National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership. She is the author of numerous publications on urban neighborhoods, community research methods, and social welfare policy.
Swati Desai
Income and Benefits Policy Center
Swati Desai is a senior fellow at Rockefeller Institute of Government. Previously, she was an associate professor of practice at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and executive deputy commissioner for the Office of Evaluation and Research and Data Reporting at New York City’s Human Resources Administration. Her research and evaluation has focused on programs for and data about low-income people in New York City.
George Galster
Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center
Video Interview
George Galster is the Clarence Hilberry Professor of Urban Affairs in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Wayne State University, Detroit. Prior to assuming this position in 1996, he was the director of Housing Research at the Urban Institute.
Bowen Garrett
Health Policy Center
Bowen Garrett is chief economist of the Center for U.S. Health System Reform at McKinsey & Company. He previously worked at the Urban Institute, where he led the development of the Health Insurance Policy Simulation Model and studied the likely effects of alternative reform proposals. He has written about employer-sponsored insurance, Medicaid and the uninsured, and Medicare’s prospective payment systems. With Health Policy Center colleagues, he studies health reform and coverage and how they relate to broader economic trends.
Tracy Gordon
Tax Policy Center
Tracy Gordon is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has authored reports and journal articles on state and local budgeting, local property taxes, the local initiative process, and so-called "private governments" or common interest developments. She is currently on leave at the Brookings Institution, where she will be pursuing topics related to fiscal stimulus and state and local governments.
Daniel Halperin
Tax Policy Center
Daniel Halperin is the Stanley S. Surrey Professor at Harvard Law School. In addition, he is the Vice Chairman of the Board for the Pension Rights Center. He previously taught at University of Pennsylvania Law School, Georgetown Law Center, and Yale Law School; was in private practice for six years; and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary (Tax Legislation) in the Department of Treasury, Office of Tax Policy.
Harry Holzer
Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population
Harry J. Holzer is a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and a senior research fellow at the American Institutes for Research. He previously served as chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor and was a professor of economics at Michigan State University. Holzer's research has focused primarily on the labor market problems of low-wage workers and other disadvantaged groups.
Derek Hyra
Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center
Video Interview
Derek S. Hyra is Associate Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on inner city economic development, with an emphasis on national housing policy, urban politics, and race. He is the author of The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville and is currently working on his second book which investigates the topics of race, class, and revitalization in Washington, D.C.'s Shaw/U Street neighborhood.
Paul Jargowsky
Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population
Paul A. Jargowsky is Professor of Public Policy at the University of Texas at Dallas. His principal research interests are inequality, the geographic concentration of poverty, and residential segregation by race and class. Previously, he served as project director for the New York State Task Force on Poverty and Welfare Reform. His book, Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City, was named "Best Book in Urban Affairs Published in 1997 or 1998" by the Urban Affairs Association.
Elizabeth K. Keating
Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy
Elizabeth K. Keating is an assistant professor of accounting at Boston College. Her research focuses on financial stewardship of nonprofit and governmental organizations. She was lead author of the "Passion and Purpose" report, a Boston Foundation study on the financial health of the Massachusetts nonprofit sector. Prior to becoming an academic, Keating ran a consulting firm serving nonprofit organizations and also worked as a credit officer and research analyst on Wall Street.
Sharon Long
Health Policy Center
After more than 20 years at the Urban Institute, Sharon Long is now a professor in the School of Public Health and a senior economist at the State Health Access Data Assistance Center at the University of Minnesota. She continues to work with the Institute's Health Policy Center on a number of projects, including the ongoing evaluation of Massachusetts's landmark health reform initiative.
Ron Mincy
Income and Benefits Policy Center
Sandra Newman
Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center
Sandra Newman is professor of policy studies at Johns Hopkins University. She directs both the Center on Housing, Neighborhoods and Communities and the International Fellows in Urban Studies Program at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies and holds joint professorial appointments with the departments of Sociology and Health Policy and Management. Newman is the author of Low-End Rental Housing (2005), Housing and Mental Illness (2001), The Home Front: The Implications of Welfare Reform for Housing Policy (1999), and Beyond Bricks and Mortar (1992, with A. Schnare).
Francie Ostrower
Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy
Francie Ostrower is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also a senior fellow at the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service. She is the author of Why the Wealthy Give, Trustees of Culture, Nonprofit Governance in the United States, and numerous other publications on philanthropy, governance, and cultural participation.
Dennis C. Smith
Center for International Development and Governance
Dennis C. Smith is an associate professor of public administration at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service. He is an expert in urban police management and the use of outcome measurement and management in public, nonprofit, and international organizations—and he has published research and consulted extensively in these two areas.
Paul Smoke
Center for International Development and Governance
Paul Smoke is professor of public finance and planning and director of International Programs at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University. His main research and policy interests include public sector decentralization and urban development, with a focus on eastern and southern Africa and Southeast Asia. He previously taught at MIT and worked with the Harvard Institute for International Development. Smoke publishes extensively on decentralization and local government and has worked with many international development agencies.
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