For Immediate Release: April 12, 2004

Baltimore, MD -- Optimal Solutions Group (Optimal), the fast-growing economic research and consulting firm based in Baltimore City and Prince George's County, announces the addition of Grace Hong to its team. Ms. Hong is a Research Associate at Optimal.

Her research interest focuses on child welfare and welfare reform. Ms. Hong's past experience includes work at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County's Department of Public Policy, where she was on the evaluation teams of the Maryland Guardianship Assistance Project and the Maryland Child Welfare Managed Care Demonstration Evaluation Project. She evaluated the effects of a guardianship subsidy on exit types and placement stability for children in kinship foster care. She also examined the efficacy of a managed care approach to child welfare services. Ms. Hong has considerable experience in data management, and is proficient at several statistical software packages--SAS, STATA, SPSS.

Ms. Hong is completing her doctorate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her area of concentration is program evaluation with an emphasis on quantitative research. She earned a Mater of Policy Sciences from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2002.

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Optimal Solutions Group, LLC, is a minority-owned economic and policy analysis consulting firm in the Baltimore-Annapolis-Washington, DC area.  We are committed to supplying insightful program evaluation, cost-benefit and effectiveness analyses, custom econometric modeling, and market analyses for decisionmakers in both the public and private sectors.

OPTIMAL has served the needs of numerous governmental and commercial clients, including federal and state agencies, community-based organizations, business associations, and law firms.