Dana Thomson is a senior behavioral/social scientist at RAND. With nearly two decades of experience conducting rigorous research on child and family well-being, she designs, evaluates, and improves programs that strengthen families, particularly those experiencing economic hardship.
Thomson has led research and evaluations spanning refundable tax credits, nutrition and housing supports, childcare, and cash assistance. Her study, Lessons from a Historic Decline in Child Poverty, examined the economic, demographic, and policy forces behind a nearly 60 percent reduction in child poverty over the last quarter century. Her work also includes studies on administrative burden and access disparities in safety net programs, training and technical assistance for Head Start staff on family economic mobility, federal efforts to integrate child and family well-being measures into program goals, microsimulation modeling that traces how program interactions cascade across families' lives and state budgets over time, and community co-design of AI-enabled navigation tools to improve access to economic supports.
Thomson has a proven track record of translating complex policy analyses into actionable guidance through briefings for federal and state policymakers, policy briefs, and technical assistance. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, PBS Newshour, NPR's Planet Money, and other media outlets. Her research strives to elevate the diversity of experiences among families who face economic hardship, to identify the key programmatic and policy features that are most effective and scalable, and to improve access to effective programs. Her expertise encompasses both mixed-methods evaluation and advanced quantitative methods, including causal inference analyses.
Ph.D. in applied developmental & educational psychology, Boston College; M.S.Ed. in human development & social policy, Northwestern University
