Samia Amin
Samia Amin is a managing researcher and the director of Workforce Development at AIR. She is passionate about promoting evidence-based innovation in the public sector. Her current areas of focus leading projects that help federal agencies pilot new ways of making evidence accessible and actionable and partnering with state and local agencies to apply behavioral science, human-centered design, and data-driven improvements to revamp social services. She oversees AIR’s large portfolio of research and continuous improvement work with federal, state, and local workforce agencies and philanthropic organizations. Amin presents widely on research and behavioral science topics to policymakers and practitioners.
To her innovation efforts, Amin brings close to two decades of experience in applied research. She has expertise in identifying effective strategies to help underserved groups thrive. These include unemployed workers, dislocated workers, low-income adults, welfare recipients, and youth and young adults. Amin brings strong skills in designing evidence to action strategies, forging research practice partnerships on evidence-based pilots, behavioral insights, evidence translation, evidence capacity building, and rigorous evaluation methods (combining implementation and experimental studies), evidence translation, and research-practice partnerships.
Amin has demonstrated considerable ability to provide technical and managerial leadership to large multifunctional teams on fast-paced projects. She has been a project director (PD) and/or deputy project director on 14 projects, including six for the U.S. DOL and served as principal investigator (PI) on 14 projects, including nine for diverse labor agencies. She is the PI for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Evidence to Action Portfolio Project, co-PI of the HHS Pathways Clearinghouse, and PD and PI of two large scale projects in two states (Nebraska and Pennsylvania), working with their labor departments to assess and redesign unemployment insurance claims systems. She is also serving as PD on an innovative project testing the development and use of intelligent tutoring systems as supplements to instructors for Per Scholas, a proven sectoral training program. She has previously provided intellectual and project leadership roles on a range of projects that pilot program innovations driven by evidence, including the U.S. Department of Labor’s Behavioral Intervention Projects, the Self-Employment Training Demonstration projects, and the U.S. DOL’s Clearinghouse of Evaluation and Research.
M.P.P., Harvard University; B.A., Middlebury College