Natasha Pilkauskas joins Poverty Solutions as associate director
By Lauren Slagter
Social welfare policy scholar Natasha Pilkauskas will join Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan as associate faculty director of faculty engagement, effective Oct. 1.
Pilkauskas is an associate professor of public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. She joins inaugural Faculty Director Luke Shaefer and Senior Associate Faculty Director Kristin Seefeldt in providing oversight of Poverty Solutions. Established in 2016, Poverty Solutions is a university-wide, interdisciplinary initiative that partners with policymakers and community groups to find new ways to prevent and alleviate poverty through action-based research.
Luke Shaefer
“Natasha is a nationally-recognized scholar of social welfare policy who has written important papers on policies including the Earned Income Tax Credit and the expanded Child Tax Credit, as well as different forms of family living circumstances. I have deep respect for her work and approach,” said Shaefer, who is the Hermann and Amalie Kohn Professor of Social Policy and Social Justice and a professor of public policy.
Poverty Solutions currently has a network of faculty affiliates and is looking to deepen those relationships in ways that faculty find useful while advancing an action-based research agenda.
Kristin Seefeldt
“Natasha has already worked closely with Poverty Solutions, and we’re excited to officially welcome her to our team. She brings a strong interdisciplinary approach to research and connections to other poverty scholars across campus,” said Seefeldt, an associate professor of social work who joined Poverty Solutions in 2019 and served as acting faculty director in the 2024-25 academic year while Shaefer was on sabbatical.
Pilkauskas came to U-M in 2015 after holding postdoctoral research positions at Cornell and Columbia universities. Initially, she was interested in international social policy, motivated by her childhood growing up in Europe. As she learned more about child poverty in the U.S., her research interests shifted to how family structures intersect with economic opportunity.
Pilkauskas’ research on the Earned Income Tax Credit has studied its impacts on living arrangements and housing, job quality, and child care use. Studying the impact of the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit alongside Shaefer and Ford School colleague Katherine Michelmore came as a natural extension of that work.
Related policy brief: The Effects of Income on the Economic Well-being of Families with Low Incomes: Evidence from the 2021 Expanded Child Tax Credit
“Working at the Ford School of Public Policy has been a dream job,” Pilkauskas said. “I’ve had so many opportunities to collaborate with colleagues and to pursue partnerships and do research I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do on my own.”
In her new role at Poverty Solutions, Pilkauskas will be looking for ways to foster that type of collaboration among faculty so U-M’s research can continue to inform systems change that benefits people with low incomes.
“An interdisciplinary approach is so important. We all have different skills and areas of expertise. Together, we can come up with better research questions, and we can bring together various research methods and ways of thinking through theory, process, and evaluation,” Pilkauskas said.