Speaker biographies

Douglas J. Besharov is the Joseph J. and Violet Jacobs Scholar in Social Welfare Studies at AEI, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, and director of the Welfare Reform Academy. Between 1975 and 1979, he was the first director of the U.S. National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. Among his many books are Recognizing Child Abuse: A Guide for the Concerned (Simon and Schuster, 1990), Rethinking WIC: An Evaluation of the Women, Infants, and Children Program (AEI Press, 2001), and Family and Child Well-Being after Welfare Reform (Transaction, 2003). Mr. Besharov is currently the president of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Dan Bloom is director of the Welfare and Barriers to Employment policy research area at MDRC. He is currently directing the evaluation of the Center for Employment Opportunities program for ex-prisoners. Mr. Bloom was part of the management team for the federally funded Employment Retention and Advancement project and directed three evaluations of state welfare reform waiver projects. He was a member of the team that developed the Parents’ Fair Share demonstration, a multisite test of programs that provided employment services to noncustodial parents with children on welfare. Since joining MDRC in 1988, Mr. Bloom has written more than thirty research reports and a book summarizing lessons learned from studies of welfare-to-work programs. He previously worked for America Works and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Stephen Camp-Landis received a doctorate in public administration in 2008 from the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. His dissertation, Redistributive Policy in an Individualistic Culture: Welfare Reform in Pennsylvania, 1996–2002, examines the politics of welfare reform policymaking and implementation in Pennsylvania. In 2004 and 2005, Mr. Camp-Landis served as assistant budget director for the city of Philadelphia. In 2003, he was a staff analyst at the city’s Tax Reform Commission. Prior to entering the Wagner School, he served as a policy analyst in Philadelphia at the Mayor’s Office of Policy and Planning (1996–98), the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority (1994–96), and the Pennsylvania Economy League (1988–94).

Jason DeParle is a senior writer at the New York Times and a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine. Mr. DeParle won a George Polk Award in 1999 for his reporting on the welfare system and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is an expert in implementation details related to welfare reform. In his most recent book, American Dream, Mr. Deparle tracked three women in Milwaukee to evaluate whether the "upheaval in social policy" that took place in the 1990’s, TANF, really worked.

Tom Gais is codirector of the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York. He has conducted research and written on American federalism; the implementation of social programs and especially welfare reform by state and local governments; state spending on social programs and the effects of state fiscal capacity and economic changes; nonprofit social service organizations and their relations with state and local governments; campaign finance reforms and their implementation and effects; state constitutional reform processes; and interest groups in the United States.

Ron Haskins is a senior fellow in the economic studies program and codirector of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution. He is also a senior consultant at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore. Mr. Haskins is the author of Work Over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law (Brookings, 2006), the coauthor of Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America (Pew Charitable Trusts and Brookings, 2008), and a senior editor of the journal The Future of Children. In 2002 he was a senior adviser to the president on welfare policy. Prior to joining Brookings and Casey, Mr. Haskins spent fourteen years on the staff of the House Committee on Ways and Means Human Resources Subcommittee, first as welfare counsel to the Republican staff, then as the subcommittee’s staff director. While serving on the subcommittee, he was editor of the 1996, 1998, and 2000 editions of the Green Book. From 1981 to 1985, he served as a senior researcher at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Pamela Holcomb is the managing director of the Columbia Pike Revitalization Organization (CPRO) in Arlington, Va. She is a member of both Arlington County’s 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness leadership consortium and the county executive council and serves as chair of the Integrated Services Implementation Committee. Ms. Holcomb also serves on Arlington County’s Community Development Citizens Advisory Committee and is a member of Arlington Economic Development’s Small Business Coordinating Council. Prior to joining CPRO in 2007, Ms. Holcomb was a senior research associate at the Urban Institute. During her twenty-one year tenure at the Urban Institute, Ms. Holcomb’s research covered a wide range of issues concerning workforce development, welfare, and social services for low-income populations, especially those with barriers to employment, and she specialized in conducting field-based implementation research.

Irene Lurie is a senior fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government and professor emeritus in the Department of Public Administration and Policy in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She was previously on the staff of the President’s Commission on Income Maintenance Programs, the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. She has examined welfare programs at the federal, state, and local levels, including a ten-state study of the implementation of the Family Support Act of 1988. Her four-state study of the implementation of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families focused on the behavior of workers at the frontlines of welfare and workforce agencies. In 2006, the Rockefeller Institute published her book reporting on this study, At the Front Lines of the Welfare System: A Perspective on the Decline in Welfare Caseloads.

Karin Martinson is a senior research associate at the Urban Institute. She has over twenty years of research and policy experience on issues relating to low-income families, including welfare reform, employment retention and advancement strategies, education and training, child care assistance, child support enforcement, and services for hard-to-employ welfare recipients. Ms. Martinson has worked on several studies focusing on strategies to improve economic outcomes for low-wage workers, noncustodial fathers, and welfare recipients. She was formerly a senior policy analyst at the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she was involved in the development of the welfare reform law and served as a senior researcher and consultant for MDRC.

Lawrence M. Mead is a professor of politics and public policy at New York University and a visiting fellow at AEI. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, Princeton University, and the University of Wisconsin. He has also been a visiting fellow at Princeton and at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Mr. Mead is an expert on the problems of poverty and welfare in the United States. Among academics, he was the principal exponent of work requirements in welfare, the approach that now dominates national policy. He is also a leading scholar of the politics and implementation of welfare reform. He is the author of seven books and over a hundred other publications. Government Matters (Princeton University Press, 2004), his study of welfare reform in Wisconsin, was a cowinner of the 2005 Louis Brownlow Book Award, given by the National Academy of Public Administration.

Demetra Nightingale is a principal research scientist in employment, welfare, poverty, and social policy at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies and principal research associate and program director in the Labor and Social Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Her recent research has examined changes in the structure of the nation’s economy and the functioning of the labor market as it relates to specific groups that may require specific services, including moving welfare recipients to work. Her recent studies, including publications such as Reshaping the American Workforce in a Changing Economy (Urban Institute Press, 2007) and the article "Welfare Program Performance: An Analysis of South Carolina’s Family Independence Program," have analyzed social policies and evaluated work programs from organizational, individual, and programmatic perspectives.

LaDonna Pavetti is a senior fellow at Mathematica. She is a noted expert on the implementation of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and on strategies to address the needs of the hard-to-employ. She has led or participated in research and technical assistance projects that have taken her to about half of the states. Ms. Pavetti is currently working on several projects to examine how states and local welfare offices are changing their policies and service delivery systems to meet the higher work participation rates required by the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. She recently completed a project that focused on innovative strategies for TANF recipients living with a disability. Ms. Pavetti started her human service career as a social worker and then worked as a program and policy analyst for the District of Columbia and the federal government.

Sheila Zedlewski is the director of the Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Policy Center. She is a specialist in the areas of income transfer policy, employee benefits, aging, and the use of microsimulation to forecast and analyze income transfer and health benefits policies. Ms. Zedlewski directs and participates in projects evaluating trends in employment-based retiree health insurance and the effects of government programs on poverty. She has participated in a wide variety of projects focused on retirement policy and the needs of the elderly in the twenty-first century, including projections of the number and characteristics of the elderly population in 2030. She has employed numerous microlevel databases in her research, including the Health and Retirement Survey, the Retirement History Survey, and the Pension and Health Supplements to the Current Population Surveys.

View Event Details