Senior Vice President of Government Performance, Pew Charitable Trusts

Kil Huh, Ph.D., is a senior vice president and head of Pew’s government performance portfolio, which delivers the research, solutions, and momentum decisionmakers need to ensure our nation’s institutions can help solve people’s problems and avoid creating new ones. 

Improving the performance of these public and private institutions is the central approach to the portfolio’s two overarching goals: delivering better health outcomes for people in the United States and ensuring they can climb the economic ladder. Those goals are pursued through a wide range of the portfolio’s nearly 15 policy-focused projects, including a collection of behavioral health-related projects that aim to improve emergency responses to people in crisis, access to medications for opioid-use disorder, and reducing missed opportunities to suicide risk among people admitted to hospitals.—from ensuring access to affordable, quality broadband, to addressing the nation’s lack of attainable housing.  

Huh has been with Pew since 2007 and previously led its fiscal and economic policy projects. Through that work, he and his team helped policymakers develop and adopt evidence-based policies that strengthened the finances of state and local governments and improved their outlook for long-term economic growth. Huh has also managed Pew’s work on family economic security, which applies a rigorous, analytical approach to the study of Americans’ financial well-being and economic challenges, including consumer finance, retirement security, and repayment of student debt.

Before joining Pew, Huh was director of policy and consulting for the Fannie Mae Foundation, where he previously managed the foundation’s state and local initiatives. Huh holds a bachelor’s degree in urban regional studies from Cornell University, a master’s in urban planning from New York University, and a master’s in philosophy and a doctorate in urban planning from Columbia University.