Saunders joined MDRC in June 2016 as a technical analyst for the federally funded Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE). She focuses on cleaning, processing, and analyzing data collected from family participants to assess impacts on a variety of domains pertaining to the mother and the child. Saunders holds a BS in mathematics and economics from the University of Delaware and a master’s degree in public health from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. At Columbia she concentrated on the impacts of social and economic factors on the health of low-income families and individuals using a quantitative lens. For her thesis she researched the paradoxical hypothesis that participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is associated with higher rates of diabetes. As a graduate student, Saunders worked as an aide for the Syndromic Surveillance Unit at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where she developed an algorithm to connect text-based search criteria for various health conditions with standard medical billing codes.
