Dan Gaylin is the President and Chief Executive Officer of NORC at the University of Chicago. Working closely with NORC’s Board of Trustees and senior leaders, he is responsible for all aspects of the organization’s strategic vision, daily operations, research agenda, and client offerings.

NORC is an objective, non-partisan, global research institute. With 2,600 employees, its primary offices are in Chicago and the Washington DC area, with multiple regional locations throughout the United States. The organization conducts approximately $225 million in research each year for government, nonprofit, and business clients in the United States and in over 50 countries around the world. NORC’s work touches on the full range of human experience including economics and the workforce, education and learning, international development, health and well-being, and society and public affairs. Founded in 1941, NORC has a long-standing reputation for scientific rigor and innovative leadership in advancing the methods, scope, and accessibility of modern research.

Gaylin, who brings 30 years of experience spanning government, private consulting, and not-for-profit research organizations, joined NORC in 2000. He is a nationally recognized expert in program evaluation, with a particular focus on health policy. A hallmark of his work has been leadership of many long-term, multimillion dollar projects that combine primary data collection and analysis, analysis of existing data, and the use of qualitative research methods to gather and distill complex information into recommendations for improving policy, programs, and practice. He led the development of the congressionally mandated evaluation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program and directed several major patient care demonstration evaluations for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Prior to joining NORC, Gaylin served as a Senior Advisor for Research and Planning at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Health Policy, in which he managed a portfolio of research projects designed to inform Secretarial-level policy initiatives. In addition, he was co-chair of the Prescription Drug Task Force that developed detailed information on prescription drug utilization, costs, and access in a special report to the White House. He also chaired an HHS-wide workgroup consisting of all of the HHS Agency Directors who reported to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary on research coordination and planning within and across each of the HHS agencies.

Gaylin has published widely in leading peer-reviewed journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Health Affairs. Guided by a deep passion for the effective dissemination of research, Gaylin co-founded The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at NORC, an innovative partnership between NORC and The Associated Press (AP), one of the world’s largest media organizations. In that role, he was co-author of the Center’s first study, Civil Liberties and Security: 10 Years after 9/11.

Gaylin is a frequent speaker both nationally and internationally on issues related to effective use of data and information to inform decision-making, the democratization of data, data transparency, and data literacy. Central to these presentations is the importance of data quality and the imperative to keep the needs of people, communities, and civil society at the center of data collection and analysis in a rapidly growing and evolving digital world.

He holds an MPA in Health Policy and Quantitative Analysis from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, with an undergraduate degree in Biological Basis of Behavior from the University of Pennsylvania.

Jeffrey Telgarsky is Executive Vice President of Research and leads the International Projects department at NORC. He is responsible for all aspects of program development and project management for NORC’s international research and technical assistance activities, including client relations, development of partnerships and collaboration, quality assurance, financial management, and contract/subcontract administration. Since the creation of the International Projects department in 2005, he has led the development of NORC’s portfolio of international work, which now includes more than 70 current and completed projects in more than 30 countries.

Telgarsky is an economist and experienced senior manager with a strong background in development policy, democracy and governance, public finance, poverty alleviation, and monitoring and evaluation. He has worked with the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, the German Technical Cooperation Agency (GIZ), and the Inter-American Development Bank. He brings to his managerial role a strong background in a variety of technical areas, including monitoring and evaluation. He is currently NORC’s Project Director on three impact evaluations concerning agricultural programs – a food security program involving rice farmers in Burkina Faso and Sri Lanka, a capacity-building program for cotton farmers in six African countries, and a technical assistance and investment program promoting increased value-added for cashew growing and processing in five African countries. He has also completed evaluations for the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group.  

Prior to joining NORC, Telgarsky served for 12 years as the director of the Urban Institute’s International Activities Center, where he managed three major regional USAID contracts in the fields of local government, housing, and urban development in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He has published work on the development of policy think tanks, the institutional development of nonprofit organizations, housing privatization in Eastern Europe, and the linkages between urbanization and national economic development. As part of Urban Institute teams, he developed urban strategies for a number of USAID missions. These studies, carried out in Bolivia, Jamaica, Honduras, India, and the Caribbean, described and analyzed the urban sector with particular aspects emerging as key areas for USAID participation: in Bolivia, the informal sector; in Jamaica, land and shelter delivery; in Honduras, housing finance; in India, land development and delivery; and in the Caribbean, the relationships between urbanization, economic development, and the environment.

Sally Buzbee is the Senior Vice President and Executive Editor of The Associated Press. She oversees global news operations and news content in text, photos and video from journalists based in more than 260 locations worldwide.

Previously Buzbee served as Washington bureau chief for six years, where she led AP’s coverage of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump and the 2012 election, including oversight of polling and investigative units, as well as coverage of institutions such as the White House, Congress and the Pentagon.  

Buzbee joined AP in 1988 as a reporter in Kansas and also worked as a reporter in Los Angeles and Washington. In 1996 she became assistant bureau chief for news in Washington where she ran spot news coverage and oversaw in-depth foreign affairs and national security coverage. For five years beginning in November 2004, Buzbee served as AP’s Middle East regional editor based in Cairo. In that position she led AP’s news coverage across media formats during the Iraq war, and managed personnel, logistics, budgets and security for AP’s Middle East region.

Buzbee holds a journalism degree from the University of Kansas and a Master of Business Administration from Georgetown University. She has two daughters, Emma and Margaret.

David Scott is a vice president and managing editor at The Associated Press, where he is responsible for the operations of the news agency’s global newsroom. Scott also oversees AP’s public opinion research team and election decision desk, and coordinates AP’s overall coverage of U.S. elections – from the vote count that tells the world who won to the AP VoteCast election survey that explains the reasons why.

Scott joined AP as a reporter in St. Louis in 1999, where he covered the downfall of Trans World Airlines and the rise of Monsanto. Later, in North Carolina as news editor, Scott led the AP’s coverage of the Duke lacrosse rape case and the political career of John Edwards. He also set up and directed the AP’s Blacksburg, Va., newsroom following the Virginia Tech shootings, and served as an on-site editor during several hurricanes, including Katrina, Ike and Gustav.

In 2009, he was named the AP’s first regional editor for the Central U.S. In that role, he led the cooperative’s journalism in 14 middle American states and oversaw its Chicago-based publishing center. During his five-year tenure, the region’s journalists won three APME Deadline Reporting Awards and an honorable mention in a fourth year.

Scott served as AP’s political editor for the 2014 and 2016 U.S. elections, directing coverage of campaigns and American politics from Washington. In that role, he joined the AP-NORC Center team and began his work with AP’s polling unit. In 2018, he was part of the team that created AP VoteCast, the news cooperative’s replacement for the legacy exit poll, and shepherded its introduction into the market and AP’s own newsroom as the indispensable Election Day storytelling tool.

Scott is a native of Philadelphia who grew up in Milwaukee and is a graduate of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. He lives in Portland, Maine.

Emily Swanson is the director of public opinion research at The Associated Press. A member of AP’s polling unit in Washington since 2014, she oversees polls conducted by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, including AP’s role in questionnaire design, data analysis and story development. Swanson also played a key part in the development of AP VoteCast, AP’s pioneering election research survey.

As part of her role guiding journalists in their use of survey data, she helped develop updated polling standards published in a new chapter of the AP Stylebook in 2018, bringing those standards up to date for modern polling methods. The new chapter included the guidance that “poll results that seek to preview the outcome of an election must never be the lead, headline or single subject of any story.”

Swanson also serves on the organization’s election night decision desk, analyzing vote returns, historical data and the results of AP VoteCast to determine when AP officially calls the winner in elections all across the country.

Prior to joining the AP, she was polling director at The Huffington Post, where she ran the site’s first survey research partnership. Before that, she was associate editor of the poll aggregation website Pollster.com.

Swanson is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she held her first job in the field of survey research as a telephone interviewer. A native of Saint Paul, Minnesota, she now lives in Washington, D.C. with two cats and more plants than she cares to count.