Spring Preview Alumni Bios
Grace Evans, MPP '16
Grace Evans is a senior program associate at the Richard King Mellon Foundation in Pittsburgh, PA where she supports strategic initiatives and grantmaking aimed at increasing the quality of life and economic development of southwestern Pennsylvania. Grace previously served as a Government Performance Lab Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School where she supported performance initiatives in Rhode Island’s Department of Corrections. While at the Ford School, she focused on state and local policy, interning in the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Economic Policy, Planning, and Strategy in the City of Detroit. Grace has worked in the nonprofit sector in her home city of Pittsburgh and is an alumna of the Coro Center for Civic Leadership’s Public Affairs Fellowship. She holds a BS in mathematics and a BS in nonprofit management from Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania.
Sam Geller, MPP '17
Sam Geller is a budget analyst with the City of Detroit Office of Budget. Geller provides fiscal analysis and program evaluation to a wide range of city departments and agencies. Prior to this role, Geller worked for numerous nonprofit organizations in Massachusetts and served as a finance staffer on political campaigns for U.S. congressional, governor and city council races. In 2017, Geller served as the Riecker Michigan Delegation Fellow with U.S. Senator Gary Peters (D-MI).
Latesha Love-Grayer, MPP '02
Mrs. Love serves in the Senior Executive Service as an Acting Director in GAO’s International Affairs and Trade (IAT) team. She has over seventeen years of experience leading performance and forensic audits in a wide range of federal program and policy areas. In IAT, she leads a cross-cutting portfolio of evaluations examining international policy issues such as women’s rights and trade, foreign assistance to reconstruction and peace-keeping efforts, efforts to combat international human trafficking, and international cybersecurity issues, among others. She is also a speaker at various national and international conferences on using data analytics and other leading practices to evaluate programs and risks.
Prior to IAT, Ms. Love spent several years in GAO’s Strategic Issues and Forensic Audits and Investigative Services teams leading performance and forensic audits in areas such as consumer financial protection, Medicare, contracting, immigration, taxes and the economy, regulatory policies, human capital management, intergovernmental response and recovery from catastrophic events, and governmentwide efforts to improve the efficiency and fraud risk management of agencies. Ms. Love’s work has led to identifying millions of dollars in savings to federal programs as well as a range of changes to federal programs, policies, and legislation that have improved their performance, operations, and risk management.
Outside of audit work, Ms.Love has led various GAOwide initiatives to improve the performance, accountability, culture, and processes in GAO. In addition, she is as an Adjunct Faculty in GAO’s Learning Center; is on GAO’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusions COP Leadership Council, serves as the University of Michigan recruiting Campus Manager and Public Policy and International Affairs recruiting coordinator; and serves as a mentor and executive coach. Prior to joining GAO, she obtained a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Virginia State University and a master’s degree in Public Policy from the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, where she was also a Public Policy and International Affairs Fellow. She is married to an active duty member of the Coast Guard (Glenn) and is a proud mom of two sons (Mycale and Mason)—one of which is in college as the other is in middle school.
Prathap Kasina, MPP '09
Prathap Kasina (MPP 2009) works as the Regional Director for Asia and Latin America at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and is based out of Evanston, IL. As the Regional Director, he leads IPA country offices in Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Philippines, Peru, Mexico, Dominican Republic and Colombia (approx. 150 full-time staff). Immediately upon graduation from Ford School, Prathap worked as a research associate for Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, who are both the recipients of the 2019 Nobel prize in Economics. Over the past decade, Prathap has been directly involved in 100+ evaluations of various social programs across the developing world.