Jana Epstein

Jana Epstein is currently the Manager of Product Strategy at Biobot Analytics. Jana has also interned at Inter-American Development Bank and The Brookings Institution.

At Biobot Analytics, Jana has been responsible for Business Development and Government Affairs. Jana has researched the demand for social services in Latin America and Caribbean countries, estimated the size of vulnerable populations using household surveys, and devised a typology of countries based on current and future demographics.

At The Brookings Institution, Jana served as a Research Analyst for The Hamilton Project. Jana co-authored a public comment on a proposed SNAP work requirements rule, modeled the effect of the rule on counties, and prepared the THP director for congressional testimony. USDA cited their findings that the proposed rule impaired SNAP's recession fighting ability as a reason for changes to the final rule.

Jana also led the production process of a book called Place-Based Policies for Shared Economic Growth, by directing the production timeline and communicating with external authors, designers, and stakeholders. Jana modernized THP's data visualization techniques by incorporating R into the workflow for complicated data visualizations. In addition, they created THP's novel measure of county-level social and economic wellbeing, the Vitality Index, using confirmatory factor analysis. The Vitality Index has been featured in The New York Times, CityLab, Fast Company, and local news outlets.

Lastly, Jana organized THP's hiring process for interns and research assistants.

Jana Epstein has a Master of Business Administration from the MIT Sloan School of Management, a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and political science from Middlebury College, and a Spanish Language degree from the Middlebury College Summer Language School. Jana also attended Hall-Dale High School and was an exchange student at Lycée Honoré Daumier in Marseille, France.