Maria Elena Ortega-Hesles is an external consultant for Jobs Group and Education Group at the World Bank in Mexico. She also works for non-profit organizations, federal governments and local governments on the design and evaluation of education and labor programs, mainly in Latin America. She specializes on monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) strategies and methods. Her interest lies is in the intersection between research and policy. María Elena holds an B.A. degree in Economics from ITAM (Mexico), and an EdM in International Education Policy and an EdD in Quantitative Analysis of Education Policy from Harvard University.