Laura Beals, PhD, is the Assistant Vice President of Research and Evaluation at Economic Mobility Pathways (EMPath). She has spent most of her career working in and with social service organizations on their data, evaluation, and applied research as well as related technology. For over nine years, she was the Director of the Department of Evaluation and Learning at Jewish Family & Children’s Service Boston; at JF&CS, her team managed the agency's client-level data for performance monitoring and evaluation, including the administration and implementation of the agency’s electronic client management systems, ETO and Salesforce. Prior to JF&CS, she was the Manager for Research, Evaluation, and Technology at Connected Beginnings Training Institute, a professional development training institute for early care and education providers.

She has written, presented, and taught about a variety of topics including evaluation in nonprofit organizations, technology for evaluation, data visualization, social network analysis, and participatory data analysis. Laura was an adjunct faculty member at the Heller School at Brandeis University, where she taught "Evaluation for Managers," which focused on organizational data strategy, collection, presentation, and use.

Laura completed her Ph.D. and M.A. at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University; she graduated with a BS from the College of Engineering at Tufts.