Alyn McCarty joined Research for Action in 2017 as a Research Associate. At RFA, Alyn is the project director on a large, multi-year evaluation of an early literacy program in Philadelphia pre-k centers, and conducts quantitative research and analyses on several other projects. Prior to joining RFA, Alyn was a Health Disparities Research Scholar at the Center for Women’s Health and Health Disparities Research and served as a Research Scientist for the Lifecourse Initiative for Healthy Families, both at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Duncan Thomas is the Robert F. Durden Professor of Economics and Professor of Global Health at Duke University. After completing his Ph.D. at Princeton University, he was on the faculty at Yale, RAND and UCLA. He works on population health, human capital and the family focusing on low income populations and the impact of natural disasters, health shocks and economic shocks. To provide evidence on these questions, he has invested heavily in the design and implementation of complex large-scale population-based longitudinal studies.