Erika has sector expertise in international education and vulnerable populations with experience in health, welfare/livelihoods, governance, agriculture, and labor market research. She has field experience in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Erika currently serves as principal investigator for the U.S. Department of State’s Child Protection Compact (CPC) TIP prevalence studies in Colombia as well as Freedom Fund’s intervention development research on child domestic work in West Africa. Previously, she served as principal investigator for the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS)'s commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) prevalence study in coastal Kenya; principal investigator of GFEMS's rapid assessment of the impact of COVID-19 on CSEC in India; and associate director of GFEMS's broader TIP prevalence estimation research program in South Asia. In addition, she was team lead for USAID/Kenya’s Tusome Endline Performance Evaluation and USAID/Pakistan’s Pakistan Reading Project Endline Assessment; led field work for the U.S. Department of Labor’s 10-year study on child labor in West Africa’s cocoa sector; and provided technical leadership for an evaluability assessment of USAID’s $225 million congressionally-directed Local Works program.

Prior to joining NORC, Erika served as program director for Social Impact where she led several rigorous impact evaluations of USAID early grade literacy and numeracy programs in Ghana and Malawi; worked as a field-based research manager for Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA)’s country offices in Zambia, Malawi, and Kenya; and served as executive director of an international education NGO operating in South and Southeast Asia.