Jessica Kelly is a director of research programming in the Information Technology department at the Urban Institute, where she has worked for over a decade. She works with research staff to understand their goals and needs, and in turn develops, maintains, and documents complex and sophisticated data-processing systems and algorithms to produce analysis datasets and tables for use in research. These systems frequently involve linking and matching of data in large datasets, microsimulation modeling, and web-based random assignment tools.

Kelly is the author of Federal Justice Statistics Program Data Linking System, a technical report submitted to the US Department of Justice in 2012 on the linking system she developed.

Kelly has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Towson University.