Gloria Gong is the Executive Director of the Government Performance Lab at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where she leads the GPL’s efforts to accelerate the pace of change on serious social problems by improving state and local government. In 2014, GPL founder Professor Liebman recruited Gloria to lead the transformation of the Social Impact Bond Technical Assistance Lab into the Government Performance Lab, growing it from an organization of six employees working in eight states into an organization of over 50 that has completed 200 projects in 89 jurisdictions, advising governments on over $6B in results-driven contracting, and carrying out projects improving services to over 400,000 people in five areas-- behavioral health and homelessness, children and families, criminal justice, education and jobs, and strategic procurement.

Prior to becoming Executive Director, Gloria served as a Managing Director over the GPL’s Criminal Justice, Homelessness, and Behavioral Health practices, including building a new criminal justice practice focused on supporting governments implementing pretrial reforms designed to reduce the harms caused by the criminal justice system. She also served as the Director of Research and Innovation, leading the GPL’s efforts to facilitate the spread of solutions across jurisdictions. Under her management, the GPL research and communications capability increased from an average of one publication a year to 40, including solutions books for results-driven contracting and child welfare. Gloria also leads the GPL’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, including overseeing the creation and delivery of supports for centering equity in approaches to problem diagnosis and solutions generation and incorporating an equity lens into regular reviews of all current projects.

Before joining the Government Performance Lab, Gloria worked on a variety of state and national governance and legal programs including serving as the lead evaluator for the Connecticut Judicial Branch on an evaluation of its mortgage foreclosure mediation program, in the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care on the agency’s early education initiatives, and in China at the Yale China Law Center on rule of law projects including criminal justice and judicial reform. Gloria received her Juris Doctorate from Yale Law School, where she was a Public Policy Fellow at the Institute for Social and Policy Studies. She holds a BA magna cum laude from Brigham Young University.