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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.

Bettina Brunner is an international health professional bringing more than 19 years of professional experience working in HIV and AIDS, family planning and reproductive health. She focuses on private sector engagement, program management, private health sector assessments, public-private partnerships in health, health systems strengthening, technical management and grant writing. She has extensive experience working for the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank and is a specialist in West Africa. She has developed and tested policy tools, particularly tools for engaging the private health sector.

Hailu Zelelew is an economist with 30 years of experience in health financing/economics, health insurance, health policy processes, health systems strengthening and economic development. He has worked on development planning and economic cooperation; policy analysis and development; rural development; program design and management; maternal, newborn and child health; family planning and reproductive health; HIV/AIDS; and capacity building. His financial expertise includes health program costing, resource tracking, health financing policy, health insurance, public financial management, and governance. He also has extensive experience with monitoring, evaluation and research.

Dereje Dengela is an epidemiologist and entomologist with more than 25 years of experience in planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of malaria control programs. He has extensive managerial experience, having supervised as many as 94 professionals. He has held senior positions with the government of Ethiopia, worked on projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and served as a national malaria program officer in Ethiopia. He supported the Ministry of Health of Ethiopia in mobilization of financial resources from donors, particularly the Global Fund. Dengela has authored or co-authored more than 30 publications in peer-reviewed journals.

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.

Michael R. Anderson is Chief Executive Officer of MedAccess, a not-for-profit social-finance company based in London. He has expertise in global development, health, nutrition, and climate issues. Anderson has worked in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors in Africa, the Middle East, and India. He held multiple roles within the U.K.’s Department for International Development (DFID) from 2003 to 2013, the final one being director general for policy and global programs. He subsequently became the first salaried CEO of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. During his three-year tenure, he grew the organization’s grant commitments from $40 million to $220 million.