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Julia Watson is an economist and health systems specialist with 25 years of experience working on both developed and developing country health systems. She has extensive experience managing people and programs and collaborating with a wide range of partners. Her work focuses on improving health financing systems and strengthening the stewardship role of governments in mixed health systems.

Michael Witt brings more than 33 years of experience as a statistician specializing in survey design and survey data analytics. He has more than 27 years of managing staff at the administrative and project level. Mr. Witt has worked with government clients in fields ranging from energy to healthcare.

Dr. James White, a registered nurse and Collaborative Specialist in Global Health (CSGH), is a senior health specialist with a focus on infectious disease and global health security (GHS). He has over 20 years of experience that includes delivery of emergency response programs in emergency and fragile settings, pandemic preparedness and response, health systems strengthening, and public-private collaboration for GHS. White has worked in more than 20 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America assisting in both acute outbreak response and preparation for health emergencies. He also represents Abt as a technical expert on external GHS and pandemic preparedness working groups. His clients have included the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the United Kingdom’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), and the Canadian International Development Association (CIDA) (now Global Affairs Canada).

Ellen Bobronnikov has extensive research and evaluation experience in educational and social policy in both domestic and international contexts. Her focus includes project management, evaluations of federal and local programs, and the provision of technical assistance. She has experience conducting impact, implementation, and process studies.

Shelly Spoeth brings more than 25 years of strategic communication and social marketing experience to tackling complex health and social issues.  She  worked for a decade with pharmaceutical and biotechnology clients while at public relations firms including Ketchum, FleishmanHillard and Cohn & Wolfe. She then worked as a consultant for government and nonprofit clients, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), on behavioral change challenges ranging from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19. Spoeth has implemented, evaluated, and managed dozens of projects that improved health outcomes. Her capabilities include formative research and digital outreach.

René Nutter is the U.S. Food Security & Agriculture Client Account Lead. She has more than two decades of experience helping further food security and education in women and children. From studies with Yale, Harvard, and the Gates Foundation to a long and successful partnership with the USDA Food and Nutrition Services (FNS), she has led large data collection studies and evaluations, provided technical assistance, and helped train the next generation of researchers.

Dr. Fiona Mactaggart is a multi-disciplinary technical advisor with more than 10 years of experience in monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning (MERL); infectious disease control; and public health. As a co-lead of Abt's MERL portfolio, she draws on complexity theory and scientific methods to help clients test what works, discover why it works, and provide timely evidence-based recommendations to inform important decisions about policy and practice. Mactaggart contributes to business development, programme delivery, and thought leadership. She works in five key areas: monitoring (e.g., design of digital tools and visualisation platforms) research (e.g., cross-sectional survey design), evaluation methodologies (e.g., contribution analysis), learning (e.g., portfolio level evidence-informed strategic decision making), and cross-cutting MERL capabilities (e.g., adaptive management and GEDSI). Mactaggart has worked extensively in the Pacific and Southeast Asia.

Dr. Hecht is an environmental economist with more than 19 years of experience in economic analysis, policy analysis, and research. His primary areas of expertise are in environmental economics, cost-benefit analysis, regulatory economics, and decision analysis. Dr. Hecht is an expert in estimating the monetary value of “non-market” benefits, such as improvements in environmental quality, public health, safety, and security. Dr. Hecht has over 10 years of experience in the economic analysis of climate change and in evaluating the costs and benefits of climate change mitigation measures.