Karen Hardee President and Chief Executive Officer
Karen Hardee, PhD, is President and Chief Executive Officer. She is also a founding Member and a co-author for www.whatworksforwomen.org. A social demographer for over 25 years, Dr. Hardee is expert in reproductive health; rights-based programming; gender; global development and climate change; policy and program development; research and evaluation. She has been principal investigator on programmatic studies on policy and program implementation, evidence-based gender and youth programming and health outcomes, demographic and health factors, resilience, and climate change adaptation. She is also president of Hardee Associates LLC and was previously director of the Evidence Project at the Population Council, a USAID-funded project using implementation science to strengthen Family Planning/Reproductive Health Programming. She also led the Council’s strategic priority work on strengthening resilience of vulnerable populations in adapting to the effects of environmental stressors, including those related to climate change. Dr. Hardee has also been director, Center for Research and Evaluation, senior fellow and deputy director of the Health Policy Project at the Futures Group (now the Palladium Group), visiting senior fellow at Population Reference Bureau, vice president for Research at PAI, senior advisor at John Snow, Inc., principal research scientist at Family Health International (now FHI360), and presidential management fellow at USAID and the U.S. Bureau of the Census. Dr. Hardee has worked globally, most intensively in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Dr. Hardee holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University’s Population and Development Program and has published extensively.