Mara Steinhaus

Mara Steinhaus is the Senior Advisor for Research & Learning at WomenStrong International. She evaluates WomenStrong’s support for its grantee partners and works with them to strengthen their measurement, learning, and evaluation efforts. Through her work, Mara hopes to help disrupt the patriarchal structures and systems that impede people’s health and wellbeing worldwide.

Mara’s passion is finding new and better ways to measure complex issues while ensuring that the information gathered remains relevant and accessible to the people who are most affected by and best poised to apply those learnings.

Before joining WomenStrong, Mara worked at the International Center for Research on Women in Washington, D.C., where she designed, implemented, and analyzed data collected from a wide range of research, monitoring, and evaluation projects. She applied quantitative and qualitative methods to projects ranging in scale from community-based, formative research through nationally representative, quantitative evaluations. Her areas of expertise include child marriage (both in the United States and in sub-Saharan Africa), social norms measures, survey design (especially on topics such as child marriage and adolescent sexual and reproductive health), and the design of program evaluations.

Mara has a Master of Science in Public Health focusing on International Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She graduated from Arizona State University with bachelor’s degrees in Computational Mathematics and Anthropology. When not at her computer, Mara enjoys swing dancing and hiking with her rescue pup, Olaf.