Katherine O'Regan is Professor of Public Policy and Planning at the New York University Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. She also serves as Faculty Director of the Master of Science in Public Policy Program and Faculty Director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. Dr. O’Regan spent April 2014 - January 2017 serving in the Obama Administration as the Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and spent ten years teaching at the Yale School of Management prior to joining the Wagner faculty.  

Dr. O’Regan’s primary research interests are at the intersection of poverty and space: the conditions and fortunes of poor neighborhoods and those who live in them. Her research includes work on a variety of affordable housing topics, from whether the Low Income Housing Tax Credit contributes to increased economic and racial segregation, to whether the presence of housing voucher households contributes to neighborhood crime rates and whether source of income protections increase locational choice for housing voucher recipients.