Sara Merner

Sara Merner is a Policy Manager at J-PAL Europe, where she leads J-PAL’s humanitarian portfolio. She oversees two research initiatives, the Humanitarian Protection Initiative and the Displaced Livelihoods Initiative, that fund new randomized evaluations of humanitarian interventions. She provides research quality support to research teams. She also leads outreach to humanitarian organisations, and works with diverse stakeholders to identify priority evaluation questions regarding humanitarian effectiveness.

Prior to joining J-PAL in 2022, she provided evaluation training for francophone implementing organizations in the resettlement sector in Canada. Before that, she conducted randomised evaluations on access to urban centers as a research assistant in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and on climate communication as a behavioral economics research assistant at the University of Oxford’s Smith School of the Enterprise and the Environment.

Sara holds an MSc in evidence-based social intervention and policy evaluation from the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford, and a BSc in economics from Minerva University.