Selena Caldera is a Senior Strategic Policy Advisor on AARP Public Policy Institute’s caregiving team. Her work focuses on understanding the full diversity of caregiving experiences to inform more equitable and effective policies and programs. She is recognized for leveraging data to illuminate variations in caregiver experiences and surface critical insights on caregiver needs. Selena brings extensive research experience across public policy areas, including health care, education, child welfare, immigration, and retirement income. Her expertise spans quantitative and legislative analysis, survey design and implementation, and cost analysis. She currently leads work on the AARP–NAC Caregiving in the US survey and related research, advancing understanding of the financial impacts of caregiving, and solutions to better support working caregivers.

Lisa Clemans-Cope PhD is a senior research fellow in the Health Policy Division at the Urban Institute. Her work focuses on health care access, use, spending, and quality, with expertise in Medicaid, Medicare, private insurance, people dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid, and health-related survey and administrative data. For the AARP–Urban Institute Disparities Dashboard, she helps lead the health and mortality work, including analyses of disparities in preventive care, chronic condition-related hospitalizations, and leading causes of death among older adults. Clemans-Cope has published in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, and Inquiry, and her work has been widely cited in national media. She has a BA in economics from Princeton University and a PhD in health economics from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Linda Giannarelli is a Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute and the Practice Area Lead for analyses of Income, Benefits, and Poverty. Her work focuses on the operation of the US social safety net and the potential for improving the economic well-being of low-income families. Her research has included analyses of the full range of US safety net programs--including cash assistance, nutrition assistance, and subsidized housing and child care--as well as the interactions across those programs. Ms. Giannarelli co-leads the State of the Safety Net Initiative, which has developed state-level estimates of program eligibility and participation rates across multiple programs and for key demographic subgroups. She was instrumental in the development of Urban's ATTIS microsimulation model, and she has led numerous projects using ATTIS to assess the extent to which policy changes could improve families' economic well-being

Edem Hado is a senior policy and research advisor at the AARP Public Policy Institute with deep expertise in caregiving, long term services and supports for older adults, and technology policy. Her work focuses on understanding the experiences and needs of older adults and family caregivers and translating data and research into actionable policy and programmatic insights. She brings an applied, person  and family centered perspective informed by both hands on experience and policy analysis, with a strong emphasis on how systems and emerging technologies shape aging outcomes and caregiving experiences in the United States. She holds a master’s of public health with a focus in health policy from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a bachelor of arts in community health and preventive medicine from Brown University.

Catherine Harvey is a senior policy program manager at the Urban Institute, where she translates research into actionable solutions. For nearly 20 years, Harvey has advanced public policies and programs to improve households’ financial wellbeing. She previously held policy and research roles at AARP and UnidosUS, the largest Latino civil rights organization in the United States. She is a systems thinker with a passion for strengthening cross-sector collaboration in Nebraska.

Vincent Pancini is a research associate in the Health Policy Division at the Urban Institute. His work focuses on population health and health inequities, disparities in health insurance coverage and access to care, and the nonfederal share of Medicaid financing. For the AARP-Urban Dashboard, he helps support the health and mortality work, including analyses of disparities in long-term care and leading causes of death among older adults. He has a BS in economics and public policy from The Ohio State University.

Brian D. Smedley is an Equity Scholar at the Urban Institute, where he conducts research and policy analysis to address structural and institutional forms of racism that impact the health and well-being of people of color. Formerly, Dr. Smedley has held leadership positions at the American Psychological Association (APA), National Collaborative for Health Equity, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Leadership National Program Center, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and the Institute of Medicine. Among his awards and distinctions, Smedley has been honored by the American Public Health Association, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Rainbow/PUSH coalition, and the APA.

Timothy Waidmann is a health economist with over 30 years of experience studying and publishing in a variety of health and social policy topics. He has studied race and ethnic differences in morbidity and mortality; health status and active life expectancy of populations living in neighborhoods of extreme poverty; and racial and ethnic disparities in care received through the life cycle. He has several studies on growing disparities in mortality and life expectancy in the U.S., the roles of economic distress and structural racism in explaining these disparities, and has developed models estimating the aggregate cost of racial and ethnic health disparities to the US health care system. He has published studies of disability trends among the elderly in the U.S. and other industrialized countries and the impact of these trends on Medicare spending. Recently he has studied the impacts of more integration of care for Medicare-Medicaid dual enrollees.

Mingli Zhong is a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and a visiting scholar at Wharton, where she earned her PhD. A former National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) postdoctoral fellow and SSA dissertation fellow, she is a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and has received the Urban Institute’s President’s Award for Technology Innovation and APPAM’s Excellence, Equity, and Inclusion Fellowship. Dr. Zhong’s research bridges public economics and household finance, examining wealth inequality, savings, borrowing, intergenerational transfers, later-life debt, and retirement policy. Her work is supported by AARP, JPMorgan Chase, Pew, the U.S. Treasury, and SSA, and published in leading journals including the American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Journal of Risk and Insurance. Her findings have been featured in Bloomberg, The New York Times, NPR, and The Washington Post.