Karen Cunnyngham

Karen Cunnyngham specializes in federal nutrition assistance programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). She is an expert in microsimulation modeling and in using small-area estimation techniques to measure program eligibility and participation rates.

Cunnyngham joined Mathematica in 2001. She is the principal investigator on projects for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) involving the use of microsimulation to estimate how changes in SNAP policy may affect benefit costs, eligibility, and participation. The projects examine the characteristics of SNAP participants and estimate national and state rates of SNAP participation. Cunnyngham directs a project for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to develop indicators of equitable access to programs that support families and a website that houses comprehensive information on measuring equitable access to programs that support families. She has applied methods developed for the USDA and RWJF on projects for Share Our Strength and AARP. Cunnyngham also directs a project for the USDA to develop new guidance for SNAP eligibility and quality control interviews using human-centered design and cultural competency frameworks. In other work for the USDA, she is a senior advisor on a project providing technical assistance to improve SNAP application processing timeliness and payment accuracy rates, and provides quality assurance review on a project to analyze SNAP benefit redemption patterns by linking data across various sources.

Cunnyngham has presented research findings to policy and professional groups, including at conferences for the Association of Public Policy and Management, the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology, and the Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation. She testified before the House Committee on Agriculture’s Nutrition Subcommittee to share resources that policymakers could use to gain a deeper understanding of SNAP, and before the House Committee on Agriculture about using SNAP data and microsimulation models to analyze how state policy options affect the SNAP population. She holds an M.P.P. from the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy.