Dr. José Pacas (he/him) serves as CoLab’s Director of Data Leadership & Investment where he leads the work on building collaborations to strengthen and leverage administrative data capacity and access for longitudinal impact evaluations. He is an applied labor economist with over a decade of working with large administrative datasets, poverty measurement, and innovative uses of census data. Prior to joining CoLab, José served as the Chief of Data Science and Research at Kids First Chicago, as an Economist in the Poverty Statistics and the Longitudinal Research, Evaluation, and Outreach branches at the US Census Bureau, and as a Research Scientist at IPUMS focusing on the Current Population Survey and American Community Survey. José holds a Ph.D. in Applied Economics and a Master’s of Public Policy from the University of Minnesota as well as a B.A. from Williams College. José has seen the Northern Lights once before, by accident.