Ashish Kapoor joined Vera in August 2012 as a project analyst for The Guardianship Project. As a law student and as an attorney, he worked for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, where he advocated for worker and immigrant rights. Ashish was an NYU Charles Revson Public Interest Fellow at Legal Services New Jersey in Newark, where he focused on low-income landlord and tenant issues. In law school, he received the Public Interest Law Foundation grant to work in New Delhi, India as a law clerk at the Human Rights Documentation Centre. He holds a BA in economics and political science from Pennsylvania State University and a JD from Rutgers School of Law, where he was senior managing articles editor of the Race and the Law Review Journal.

Reagan has been working on criminal and juvenile justice reform at Vera since August 2007, when she joined the Institute as a senior research associate in the Center on Sentencing and Corrections. She is currently an associate research director in the Center on Youth Justice. Since joining Vera, Reagan’s work has focused primarily on informing and evaluating state-level community corrections reforms. Most notably, she managed a two-year quantitative and qualitative research project for the New York State Division of Parole, the results of which were used to develop an empirically-based system of graduated options for responding to violations and other behaviors of people on parole. Reagan also has a great deal of experience evaluating the implementation of criminal and juvenile justice initiatives. In 2009, she conducted a process evaluation of a pilot specialized substance abuse supervision program in the state of Nebraska, and she is currently overseeing a process and impact evaluation of juvenile facility reforms in the District of Columbia’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. Prior to joining Vera, Reagan was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also received her PhD in criminology. While at Penn, she worked on a number of projects, including the development of an evidence-based system of probation in Philadelphia and a randomized controlled trial testing the effect of restorative justice conferences in England. Her dissertation was a network analysis of 16,000 adjudicated juveniles in Philadelphia, and she worked for five years on a project, sponsored by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, to explain past trends and predict future trends in juvenile violence. Reagan received her BA in sociology from Franklin and Marshall College.

Joel J. Levy joined Vera in August 2009. For the previous eight years he was the New York regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. Prior to that, Joel was the chairman for Germany of The Ronald S. Lauder Foundation; in that capacity he built the first yeshiva in Germany since the Holocaust. Simultaneously, he was co-managing director of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in Berlin. For more than 20 years Joel was a United States Foreign Service Officer, with assignments in Romania, Tanzania, Malta, Washington, DC, and Berlin, where he was the head of the American Embassy Office. He was the founding president of the Foreign Service Youth Foundation. Before joining the Foreign Service, he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Seoul, Korea, where he taught at a Jesuit university. He also taught social studies at Port Chester High School. He holds a BA from Franklin and Marshall College and an MA from Columbia University, and he studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Lauren-Brooke joined Vera in November 2010. As part of Vera's work with the U.S. Department of Justice's Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI) Phase II, she has coordinated technical assistance to Kentucky and worked on JRI in Alabama. She has also worked with state agencies and other policy makers on criminal justice matters, providing technical assistance and testifying before state legislative committees. She is co-author of the Vera publication Reallocating Justice Resources: A Review of State 2011 Sentencing Trends. Before joining Vera, Lauren-Brooke worked as an assistant district attorney in New York City where she served in the Appeals Bureau, the Criminal Court Bureau, and the Sex Crimes Special Victims Bureau. Lauren-Brooke is a graduate of Princeton University and the Georgetown University Law Center.

Juliene joined Vera's DC office in 2007 and currently provides technical assistance through the U.S. Department of Justice's Justice Reinvestment Initiative. At Vera, Julie has also worked on improving oversight for corrections systems, provided assistance to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, directed a project that brought arts education to youth detained at DC's juvenile detention center, and supported the Ohio Green Prison Project, which aims to enhance the sustainability of prison operations while providing green job skills to incarcerated men and women. She earned her BA from Harvard College and her JD from New York University School of Law, where she was editor in chief of the New York University Law Review. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Charles R. Wilson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Prior to joining Vera, she litigated civil rights cases with a focus on employment discrimination class actions.