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:
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,
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:
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
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: