Officers and Directors
Jon Baron
President | CEO | Board Chair
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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 –
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In the New York Times as “a national leader in this movement” to increase government effectiveness through evidence about what works.
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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 ….”
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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 Masters degree from Princeton, and a Bachelors degree from Rice.
Brontë Forsgren
Director of Evidence-Based Policy
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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, 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.
In addition to her Masters Degree from Princeton, Brontë holds Bachelors’ Degrees in Economics and Political Science from Utah State University. During her time at Utah State, she worked as a Policy Fellow for the Sorenson Impact Institute.
David Yokum
Board Director
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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 Masters degree in Bioethics & Medical Humanities from the University of South Florida,
and a B.S. in Biology from Birmingham-Southern College.
Howard Rolston
Board Director
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Howard is an independent consultant with over 40 years of experience in the design and implementation of social policy experiments. Previously he was a Principal Associate at Abt Associates where he served as Principal Investigator on several large-scale randomized trials. Prior to joining Abt, Howard had a 28-year career at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he served as the Director of Planning, Research and Evaluation in the Administration for Children and Families. Reflecting that experience, he co-authored Fighting for Reliable Evidence with Judith Gueron, a book on welfare-to-work experiments.
David Klein
Board Director
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David – a partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP – has a commercial litigation practice in Washington, D.C., where he principally represents policyholders in disputes with their insurance companies. For nearly seven years, he practiced as in-house litigation counsel to the National Treasury Employees Union, a federal sector labor organization, where he litigated matters involving union certification, the negotiability of bargaining proposals, unfair labor practices, whistleblower issues, and the constitutional rights of federal employees. In his private practice, Mr. Klein has litigated in state and federal trial and appellate courts throughout the United States and the United States Supreme Court.
Mr. Klein has been active in the American Bar Association and is a Fellow of the American College of
Coverage Counsel. He places a premium on giving back to the community and devotes a substantial
part of his time to pro bono matters involving insurance and non-insurance matters.
Mr. Klein earned his Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, from Boston University and Juris Doctor from Yale Law School. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Julia Cooper Mack on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.