Meet the 2026 Rappaport Policy Fellows
Name: Afsana Alam
School: UMass Boston
Placement: Boston Mayor’s Office of Opportunity and Economic Inclusion
Project Description: Afsana will contribute to Invest Boston, a city-led initiative focused on expanding access to capital for small businesses through public-private partnerships. Her work will support framework development and policy analysis related to fiscal sponsor strategy and broader questions of equity, including how capital access connects to wealth-building and community outcomes.
Name: Kristin Avenis
School: Harvard GSD
Placement: MA Department of Energy Resources
Project Description: By the start of the summer, DOER will be obtaining new LBER data, finalizing a CECP model, and furthering progress on an AMI Electricity Data Investigation, which will also ultimately bring another new dataset. It is an exciting time at DOER! Kristin’s role as the Rappaport Fellow is to help identify uses for the new data and develop a data infrastructure strategy and framework that supports various DOER divisions' scope of work. This placement will also allow her to work across state departments, like EEA's MVP framework and report on microgrids and geothermal networks.
Name: Chinyere Azike
School: UMass Boston
Placement: MA Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development
Project Description: Chinyere will focus on modernizing compliance monitoring across workforce programs by shifting from checklist-based approaches to a proactive, risk-based framework. Current monitoring practices and gaps will be assessed, risk indicators that signal potential compliance issues will be defined, and areas where compliance intersects with service quality and outcomes will be identified.
Name: Kara Chyung
School: Harvard Kennedy School
Placement: MA Executive Office for Administration and Finance
Project Description: Kara will be supporting a Governor's Commission on MA’s State-Owned Land Payment-In-Lieu-of-Taxes (PILOT) program. The PILOT program compensates municipalities for lost local property tax revenue related to state owned land, such as state parks, forests, and wildlife sanctuaries. The Commission will explore the equity of the current program and how the state quantifies and compensates municipalities for the ecological value of conservation land. As a Rappaport Fellow, Kara will support the planning and execution of regional listening sessions to solicit local perspectives on the PILOT program, synthesize findings and develop materials for the commission, and analyze historical data.
Name: Alexandra Crocker
School: Boston University SPH
Placement: MA Department of Developmental Services
Project Description: Allie will be working with the Department of Developmental Services (DDS) on a gap analysis for their Assistive Technology program. This will involve research (with a focus on qualitative) to develop an analysis and recommendations at the state and inter-state level. She will be looking at program successes and gaps for DDS, determining if there are factors within other state models that could make Massachusetts' implementation stronger. She will also use this research to develop an analysis and recommendations paper/presentation to DDS leadership.
Name: Rachel Dooley
School: Boston University SSW
Placement: Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate
Project Description: Rachel will be looking into the experiences of youth living in group homes in Massachusetts, specifically their educational struggles while in placement. She will be conducting interviews with staff regarding what they see as barriers to youth being successful in school.
Name: Gloria Fortner
School: Northeastern
Placement: Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture
Project Description: Gloria will work with the Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture to engage with public policy issues at the intersection of arts, culture, and community investment in Boston. Her focus will center on understanding how municipal-level cultural policy decisions impact access and equity across Boston's neighborhoods and how best to advance MOAC's efforts to uplift local artists.
Name: Caroline Freedman Pinney*
School: Harvard Kennedy School
Placement: MA Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities
Project Description: Caroline is a 2026 Rappaport Finance Fellow. She will continue working on a project started in Spring 2026 as part of the Rappaport Applied Field Lab.
Name: Elizabeth Jones
School: Harvard GSD
Placement: Boston Mayor’s Housing Innovation Lab
Project Description: Liz will work on several projects this summer including researching how to make adaptive reuse/energy retrofits more economical for local residents, working with the Boston Home Center to develop a draft curriculum for Home Repair 101, pre-approved plans for residential construction, and potentially some work with developing a better mix of affordable family housing.
Name: Sein Lee
School: Harvard Medical School
Placement: MassHealth
Project Description: Sein will support the development of a payment policy proposal for outpatient behavioral health care. A central focus of her work will be designing a risk-adjusted, tiered payment methodology that shifts reimbursement from service-based to a daily- or monthly-rate model based on patient acuity, with particular attention to high-need populations and substance use disorders. This effort contributes to the advancement of value-based payment models across community behavioral health settings, including community centers and behavioral health urgent care.
Name: Rebecca Lin
School: MIT
Placement: Merrimack Valley Transit
Project Description: Becky’s project will focus on transitioning the current “flag stop” bus policy to installing fixed stops around the Merrimack Valley. This summer she will work with local organizations and MeVa to help design a process for getting consultation with the community about where they think MeVA should install the stops.
Name: Anthony Mejia
School: Boston University School of Social Work
Placement: Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security
Project Description: Anthony’s project will focus on individuals paroled from DOC facilities who are released to parole supervision. I will examine how consistently individuals are connected to key reentry supports such as housing, behavioral health treatment, healthcare, employment support, and identity documents, with the goal of identifying where handoffs are working, where breakdowns may occur, and what practical steps could strengthen early post-release coordination.
Name: Daniel Oviedo*
School: Harvard Kennedy School
Placement: City of Worcester, MA
Project Description: Daniel is a 2026 Rappaport Finance Fellow who will be continuing on a project started in Spring 2026 as part of the Rappaport Applied Field Lab.
Name: Lauryn Phinney
School: MIT
Placement: MassHousing
Project Description: Lauryn will work at MassHousing on the Strategic Community Investments (SCI) team, supporting project closings for awarded developments and the launch of a new Neighborhood Hub initiative for emerging developers in Gateway cities. She will also conduct a review of the CommonWealth Builder Program, which has just surpassed 1,000 new units since 2021, and interview program participants to evaluate user experience, document impact to date, and identify opportunities to deepen the program’s goals of expanding homeownership opportunities and closing the state’s racial wealth gap.
Name: Zara Porter
School: Harvard Kennedy School
Placement: Boston Office of Women’s Advancement
Project Description: During her internship with the Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement, Zara will work on projects to improve maternal health in Boston. This work will include researching the growing doula workforce, the birth and patient experiences of health care providers, and the current birth center landscape to provide policy recommendations to the City of Boston.
Name: Bryanna Ruiz Fernandez
School: Harvard Kennedy School
Placement: MA Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities
Project Description: During her summer internship with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities (HLC), Bryanna will support projects that improve the Residential Assistance for Families in Transition (RAFT) program. Her work will examine how access to and experiences within the program may vary across demographic groups, language preferences, and geographies. In addition to quantitative analysis, Bryanna will engage with community-based organizations and stakeholders to better understand residents’ lived experiences navigating the RAFT program and to identify potential opportunities to improve equitable access to housing assistance in the state.
Name: Jay Rumas
School: Tufts Fletcher
Placement: Boston Mayor’s Office
Project Description: Jay will work on various projects related to the 2026 World Cup.
Name: Alessandro Uribe-Rutowski
School: Harvard GSD
Placement: MassPort
Name: Jonathan Wang
School: HMS / HKS
Placement: MA Department of Substance Addiction Services
Name: Alisha Yi
School: HMS / HKS
Placement: MA Executive Office of Aging and Independence
Project Description: Alisha will be working on SHINE’s Equity & Access Analysis project. The project will focus on examining geographic and demographic patterns in access to SHINE counseling, identifying underserved populations, and helping develop targeted recommendations to improve equity and access for older adults across Massachusetts.
*Rappaport Public Finance Fellow from MLD-412 HKS Course