Officers & Directors | Coalition for Evidence Based Policy

Our Team

Jon Baron

President | CEO

Jon is a government reformer who has played a pivotal role in advancing evidence-based policymaking throughout government for over 20 years. He recently relaunched the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy – the nonpartisan organization he founded and led from 2001-2015 – and serves as the Coalition’s President, CEO, and Chairman.

From 2015-2021, Jon served as Vice President of Evidence-Based Policy at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures), where he designed and led a major research funding portfolio that has successfully grown the body of proven-effective social programs. He left Arnold Ventures in 2021 and was a candidate for Maryland governor in the 2022 election.

Jon was twice nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate to serve on the National
Board for Education Sciences (2004-2011), and was the Board’s chairman during the last year of his term. He has also served on the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Capitalizing on Science, Technology, and Innovation; and is an Honorary Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology, and a recipient of the Society for Prevention Research’s Public Service Award.

Jon's work has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other news outlets and academic publications. He has been described –

In the New York Times as “a national leader in this movement” to increase government effectiveness through evidence about what works.
In the Huffington Post as “the most effective advocate for the use of evidence in policy making outside government. His Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy has been a major force behind the evidence movement in all issue areas ….”
In Education Week as head of a nonprofit organization that was “a major mover in the Obama administration's push to use more experimental evidence in policy.”

Jon has a law degree from Yale, a master's degree from Princeton, and a bachelor's degree from Rice.

Bronte Forsgren

Brontë Forsgren

Director of Evidence-Based Policy

Brontë serves as Director of Evidence-Based Policy at the Coalition, co-leading the Coalition’s evidence review efforts and assisting in advocacy to increase the uptake of programs supported by rigorous evidence at the state and local level. Brontë also serves as the Coalition's Treasurer and Secretary.

Prior to joining the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, Brontë earned a Masters of Public Affairs degree from Princeton University. While in graduate school, she completed an internship with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA)’s Right-Fit Evidence Team in Kampala, Uganda, focused primarily on building evidence in early childhood and primary education in East Africa.

Brontë previously worked for three years as an Analyst on the Evidence-Based Policy team at Arnold Ventures (AV), a national philanthropy. She helped manage the team’s portfolio of randomized evaluations of social programs, as well as its efforts to disseminate clear and accurate summaries of study findings to policy makers, researchers, and external partners. Prior to AV, she worked as a Policy Fellow at the Sorenson Impact Institute in Salt Lake City.

In addition to her master's degree from Princeton, Brontë holds bachelor's degrees in Economics and Political Science from Utah State University.

Amanda Moderson-Kox

Senior Advisor

Amanda is a Senior Advisor with the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy. Throughout her career, Amanda has worked with philanthropy, nonprofits, and government to identify and expand the use of evidence-based programs in the U.S. and developing countries. Most recently, Amanda led strategic learning and evaluation efforts for Development Innovation Ventures – an open, tiered evidence grant fund within the U.S. Agency for International Development dedicated to piloting, testing, and scaling innovations that demonstrate rigorous evidence of impact, cost-effectiveness, and the potential to improve millions of lives around the world.

Previously, as a senior member of Arnold Ventures' Evidence-Based Policy team, Amanda funded evaluations, primarily randomized controlled trials (RCTs), to establish rigorous evidence of effectiveness for promising programs and worked to advance the use of evidence in federal and state policy. Earlier in her career, Amanda held program monitoring and evaluation roles with the non-profit organizations Family League of Baltimore and Save the Children, as well as with the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an independent U.S. foreign aid agency. She also spent several years living overseas where she established the Innovations for Poverty Action office in Bangladesh, led RCT fieldwork in Malawi, and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine.

Amanda holds a master’s degree in international economics and international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science from the University of Wisconsin. She currently lives in rural Maryland with her husband, two sons, a housecat, and several backyard chickens.

David Yokum

Coalition Lead - North and South Carolina

David is Director of The Policy Lab at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, where he leads a wide portfolio of work leveraging scientific methods to improve public policy and operations. He is also North Carolina's Chief Scientist within the Office of State Budget and Management. David provides expert support for the Coalition’s work to advance evidence-based policymaking in state and local government, and its reviews and dissemination of research findings.

David was previously the founding director of The Lab @ DC in the D.C. Mayor’s Office and, before that, a founding member of the White House’s Social & Behavioral Sciences Team and director of its scientific delivery unit housed at the U.S. General Services Administration. President Obama institutionalized the latter work in Executive Order 13707, “Using Behavioral Science Insights to Better Serve the American People.” All three ventures were exemplars of building internal-to-government scientific capacity and partnerships with universities, which have since inspired replications across the world.

David’s work – from the world’s largest field experiment of a police body-worn camera program, to building algorithms that predict the location of rats, to a Form-a-Palooza initiative systematically re-designing all government forms – has been published in diverse outlets (e.g. Nature Human Behavior, PNAS, Health Affairs, Governing Magazine), received widespread media coverage (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, etc.), and impacted individuals and communities across the country. Upwards of 100 field experiments have now been completed under The Policy Lab, The Lab @ DC, and the Office of Evaluation Sciences.

David earned a J.D. and Ph.D. (psychology: cognition and neural systems) from the University of
Arizona, a master's degree in Bioethics & Medical Humanities from the University of South Florida,
and a B.S. in Biology from Birmingham-Southern College.