Research in Health, Education and Development: Building an International Practice
Department & Center Events
Population, Family and Reproductive Health
Nancy Murray, PhD, MPH
Vice President and Director
Global Research Division
Mathematica
Dr. Nancy Murray (Ph.D., Population Dynamics, Johns Hopkins University; M.P.H., Population and Maternal and Child Health, MA Latin American Studies, UCLA) is the Vice President of Mathematica Policy Research’s Global Research Business Unit. At Mathematica, Dr. Murray has led the growth of the company’s global research and evaluation work from a handful of projects and staff to a stand-alone Business Unit with 70 staff, 20 million dollars in annual revenue, and 50 million dollars in backlog. She provides leadership and direction on Unit strategy, growth and financial performance, supervises, mentors and trains junior and senior staff, works closely with the Unit’s East African subsidiary, and provides quality assurance on select proposals and high stakes client deliverables for health and education focused projects. Dr. Murray also represents the Global Unit on Enterprise-level initiatives and priorities with our domestic business units, such as our Strategic Growth team and others.
Dr. Murray has more than thirty years of research and field experience designing and implementing program evaluations of FP/RH approaches, including AYSRH. Dr. Murray’s experience includes work with the Population Council’s Operations Research project in Latin America and the Caribbean and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID’s) Office of Population Research Division; she also served as the Latin America Regional Director for Management Sciences for Health’s FP and Management Development Project. During her time at the Futures Group International, she led research applying quantitative and qualitative approaches to policy-relevant issues in AYSRH initiatives for the USAID-funded Focus on Young Adults and the POLICY Projects.
At Mathematica, Dr. Murray has specialized in large, complex multi-country evaluations of health and education projects. She has leveraged her RH/FP and nutrition expertise to support MEL efforts for a range of foundation initiatives, including the David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s Population and Reproductive Health (PRH) program, the CIFF-funded Evaluation of The Power of Nutrition Initiative, the Gates Foundation’s Family Health Initiative in Bihar, the FP Portfolio Measurement and Learning effort, the Program Review of The Challenge Initiative, and others. She has also led the Unit’s largest project to date, the LAC Reads Evaluation project funded by USAID, a 23-million-dollar project including multiple impact evaluations of what works to improve early grade reading and workforce development outcomes for disadvantaged children and youth.