Sarah Thomason,
Principal and Founder
Sarah is a researcher with extensive experience conducting analysis to inform policy decision making and organizing campaigns. Most recently, Sarah spent six years at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, where her work was primarily quantitative and focused on care work, wages and working conditions, independent contracting and gig work, and estimating the economic impacts of minimum and living wage increases. She has strong data skills and deep knowledge of Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics datasets. Sarah is skilled at coordinating a wide variety of projects ranging from quick turnaround data briefs to multi-year studies involving multiple organizations and government agencies. Her work has been cited in major media outlets such as the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her research is informed by previous work as a union and community organizer, which helped her learn to translate complex policies and research findings to make them easy to understand for community leaders and decision makers. Sarah holds a Bachelor’s degree in Gender Studies and Political Science from DePaul University and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
Links to recent work at Movement Economics:
Residential Decarbonization Industry Study
Occupational Segregation of Black Women
California Construction Employment Dashboard
Strengthening Medicaid: Challenges States Must Address as the Public Health Emergency Ends
Cost-Benefit Analysis of San Diego County’s In-Home Supportive Services Program
Links to key work examples at the UC Berkeley Labor Center:
Front-line Essential Jobs in California: A Profile of Job and Worker Characteristics
Estimating the Coverage of California’s New AB 5 Law
The Union Effect in California
California’s Homecare Crisis: Raising Wages is Key to the Solution
Sharon Jan, Senior
Research Associate
Sharon is an experienced economic and social policy researcher who seeks to help policy leaders make evidence-based decisions. Most recently, she worked at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, where she implemented data analytics and qualitative methods to produce audits on diverse policy issues, including social safety net programs, consumer protection, and government performance. She has also produced diverse deliverables for local government entities to improve the operation of economic development and social programs.
Sharon holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of California Berkeley and a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematical Economics from Pomona College.
Links to recent work at Movement Economics:
Residential Decarbonization Industry Study
Occupational Segregation of Black Women
California Construction Employment Dashboard
Cost-Benefit Analysis of San Diego County’s In-Home Supportive Services Program
Links to key work examples outside of Movement Economics:
UC Berkeley Labor Center: Estimating the Coverage of California’s New AB 5 Law
GAO-21-83: Federal Low-Income Programs
Vivian Aluoch,
Research Associate
Vivian is a development economist with extensive experience conducting quantitative research. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of California, San Diego, where her work focuses on labor markets, education, and gender in sub-Saharan Africa. Her research includes a detailed analysis of the effects of maternity leave expansion on labor market outcomes in Kenya and the impact of university expansion on educational and employment outcomes. Vivian has honed her expertise in data analysis using tools such as Stata and R and has worked with large datasets from national censuses and household surveys.
Her professional experience includes roles as a Summer Associate at Analysis Group, where she conducted high-stakes economic analyses to support expert reports, and as an Evaluation Fellow at Alliance Healthcare Foundation, where she advised on funding decisions based on rigorous research and impact evaluations. She has also conducted field research in Kenya, training survey teams and overseeing data collection in rural regions.
Vivian holds a dual bachelor's degree in human and organizational development and economics from Vanderbilt University. Fluent in English, Swahili, and Luo, she combines her academic rigor with a deep commitment to poverty alleviation and social equity, leveraging her skills to inform evidence-based policies and programs.
Kelly Miller,
Research Associate
Kelly Miller is a researcher with a strong background in US labor and workplace policy. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Washington, where her research focuses on organized labor, social movements, and the micro-dynamics of collective action. Prior to her work with Movement Economics, Kelly worked as a strategic researcher for several labor unions in the agricultural, commercial, and educational sectors and in the Washington State Department of Labor and Industry's workers compensation division.
Kelly holds a Master of Science in Labor Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Economy from The Evergreen State College.
Links to key work examples outside of Movement Economics:
Kuochih Huang,
Economist
Kuochih is an accomplished economist with expertise in evaluating minimum wages, low wage workers' conditions, and other public policies. He was a researcher at the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, where he conducted research on many labor economic issues, including the effects of minimum wage increases, public costs of pervasive low wages, and the impacts of COVID-19 on California's Labor Market. He has extensive experience with Census Bureau and other datasets. Kuochih holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Angel Alvarado,
Data Architect
As the data architect at Movement Economics, Angel created and maintains our custom in-house data platform for analysis and reporting, develops data pipelines for ETL/ELT data from public data sources, implemented engineering standards across our team to improve data analysis development cycles, and has set up infrastructure for dashboard automatization and self-service.
Ángel has extensive experience with back end development and streaming & batch processing data using Ruby, Python, R, SparkR, and SQL. He uses stores such as Snowflake, MySQL, Redis, Mongo, Solr, ElasticSearch and Tableau, Jupyter, Streamlit and Superset to analyze data and produce visualizations. He started his career in full-stack web development, and is equally strong in PHP and JavaScript, and even a bit of shell scripting as well. He has spent the last two years developing NLP models and collaborating closely with researchers at Talking Points. Ángel has a Computer Engineering degree from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma.
Links to recent work at Movement Economics: