YSI Founder and President
Ajay Khashu
Ajay Khashu is an applied researcher and evaluation consultant with over 20 years of experience in the nonprofit and education sectors. As the founder and principal of Youth Studies, Inc., he has led large-scale evaluation, performance measurement, and data analysis initiatives for youth-serving organizations nationwide. He previously served as Research Director at The After-School Corporation and as a Senior Research Associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, where he continues to serve on the Institutional Review Board. Ajay’s expertise spans quantitative and mixed-methods research, longitudinal data analysis, and data-informed strategy development. Proficient in R, SAS, and STATA, he also has experience teaching graduate-level statistics and research methods at NYU and Hunter College. He holds degrees from Hampshire College and Northwestern University and completed doctoral work in quantitative methods at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Research Associates
Lisa DeBellis Scanga
Lisa DeBellis Scanga, Ph.D. is an applied developmental psychologist specializing in program evaluation research. She has worked in the program evaluation field in New York City for 15 years. As a research associate at YSI, she has managed the evaluations of several different types of programs serving children, teenagers, families, and educators. As the former program director of evaluation at The After-School Corporation (TASC), Lisa managed the evaluation of approximately seventy 21st Century Community Learning Center (21CCLC)-funded after-school and summer programs across New York City. She has also worked as a research consultant for the New York City Department of Education’s Research and Policy Support Group. She currently serves as an adjunct professor of psychology at Dominican College. Lisa holds a doctorate in Applied Developmental Psychology from Fordham University.
