Jennifer joined Vera in 2006 as a research associate. For several years, she has worked on designing and conducting research and analytic projects focused on juvenile justice. Most notably, she led a team that has provided long-term research support to New York City in its juvenile detention reform efforts, including: (1) creating an empirically-based detention Risk Assessment Instrument to objectively measure a youth’s risk of re-offending or failing to appear in the court in the pre-adjudication phase of trial; (2) implementing this instrument, along with a continuum of community-based alternative programs, in all five boroughs in New York City; and (3) designing and conducting a follow-up study to evaluate the effectiveness of the alternative programs and measure the impact of the reforms as a whole. Jennifer also led an effort to design and build a Juvenile Justice Research Database for the city that integrates data from multiple juvenile justice agencies and creates case-level files, and allows the city and the research community to sustain data collection and analysis related to the detention reform work. In addition, she has provided research support to the Macarthur Foundation’s Models for Change initiative, conducting evaluations of status offender diversion programs and working to encourage states to both consume and produce their own data in a self-sustained way.