Julie de Jong

Julie de Jong (MSc) is a director of survey operations for USAID’s Surveys for Monitoring in Resilience and Food Security (SMRFS) at ICF. SMRFS supports design, implementation, and results dissemination of high-quality population-based surveys using an approach that strengthens data collection, analysis and use capacities while emphasizing state-of-the-art survey methods. In this capacity, she oversees surveys in multiple USAID Feed the Future target countries through the stages of the survey lifecycle, with a focus on producing high-quality data, documentation, and reports to inform USAID programming. She also leads activities in capacity strengthening for best practices in survey design and implementation as applied to food security and resilience research.

Julie has more than 20 years of experience in design, implementation, capacity strengthening, fundraising, and leadership across all dimensions of the survey lifecycle in population-level international and cross-national household surveys for both social science research and monitoring and evaluation studies in primarily low and middle-income countries. Prior to SMRFS, survey topics have included health, ageing, socioeconomic status, housing facilities and well-being, development and family dynamics, political attitudes and behavior, political violence, and religion, with sample sizes ranging from about 3,000 cases to more than 200,000 cases.

In addition, Julie has expertise in research methodology, with a focus on considering how experimental research to understand and potentially reduce survey error while increasing quality can be embedded using cost-neutral approaches. This work has resulted in several publications on the impact of the interview context on the reliability and validity of key substantive estimates. She also specializes in comparative survey research design and has authored and contributed to multiple publications on comparative methods best practices, frameworks for assessing quality in comparative surveys, and quality assessments of cross-national surveys.

Julie began her career at the University of Michigan, where she was a survey methodologist at the Institute for Social Research Survey Research Center. When she joined ICF, she brought strong project leadership experience which required significant business development efforts and subsequent collaboration with multiple domestic and international project team members and stakeholders across a variety of institutions and comprehensive progress reporting to U.S. government funding agencies including USAID, NIH, NSF and various sectors of the Department of Defense, as well as non-government funders including the WHO, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank.

Julie holds both a Master of Science degree in survey methodology and a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of Michigan.