Isabel V. Sawhill is a Senior Fellow and co-Director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution; she currently holds the Cabot Family Chair. From 2003 to 2006 Dr. Sawhill served as Vice President and Director of the Economic Studies Program at Brookings. Prior to that, Dr. Sawhill was a Senior Fellow occupying the Arjay Miller chair at The Urban Institute. She also served as an Associate Director at the Office of Management and Budget from 1993 to 1995, where her responsibilities included all of the human resource programs of the federal government, accounting for one third of the federal budget.

Dr. Sawhill has authored and edited numerous books and articles including Restoring Fiscal Sanity 2005: Meeting the Long-Run Challenge and Restoring Fiscal Sanity: How to Balance the Budget, both with Alice Rivlin; One Percent for the Kids: New Policies, Brighter Futures for America’s Children; Welfare Reform and Beyond: The Future of the Safety Net; Updating America’s Social Contract: Economic Growth and Opportunity in the New Century; Getting Ahead: Economic and Social Mobility in America; and Challenge to Leadership: Economic and Social Issues for the Next Decade. Her research has spanned a wide array of economic and social issues, including fiscal policy, poverty, and welfare reform.

Dr. Sawhill helped to found, and now serves as President of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, a nonprofit organization devoted to reducing teen pregnancy in the United States. She has been a visiting professor at Georgetown Law School, Director of the National Commission for Employment Policy and President of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. She also serves on a number of nonprofit boards, including the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, Population Action International, and the Council for Excellence in Government. She attended Wellesley College and received her Ph.D. from New York University's Graduate School of Business Administration.