Senior Program Director
Cathryn Streifel is a senior program director at PRB. She brings to her work a deep commitment to gender equality and a passion for expanding access to family planning and reproductive health. Her expertise includes family planning and reproductive health policy, program, and advocacy initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa and the United States. She is skilled in research, writing, training, and partnership building. Streifel co-directs PRB’s State of Access project, which assesses the favorability of the policy environment for contraceptive access nationally and within each U.S. state. Streifel is a member of the technical leadership team for the USAID-funded Promoting Results and Outcomes through Policy and Economic Levers (PROPEL Health) project. She directed PRB’s Strengthening Evidence-Based Policy to Expand Access to Safe Abortion (SAFE ENGAGE) project, a four-year initiative to expand safe abortion access across eight African countries, and she oversaw a thoughtful closeout of the project through a “power-shift” lens that prioritized sustainable handover of all leadership aspects to in-country advocates.
Prior to joining PRB, Streifel served as associate director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Global Health Policy Center, where she was a key contributor to policy analyses targeting the U.S. administration and Congress in the areas of family planning and reproductive health. She also worked as a business development associate at Palladium. She holds a master’s degree in public health from The George Washington University and a bachelor’s degree in political science from McGill University. She is fluent in French.
Featured Work
A Patchwork of Access: Self-Managed Medication Abortion in Post-Roe America
Research shows that self-managed medication abortion accessed through online telehealth is medically safe and effective, but prospective patients face a complex web of barriers.
State of Access: Assessing Contraceptive Equity State by State
PRB is assessing the favorability of the policy environment for contraceptive access nationally and within each U.S. state so that state policies and programming can be easily interpreted and compared.
