Sharon Ana Entress
Sharon provides project leadership and guides research design, implementation, interpretation, and reporting of findings. She is passionate about data-driven, research-grounded solutions that meet the needs and business goals of UBRI’s partners. She considers methodology, data sources, geography, timing, and resources. She often applies her expertise to UBRI projects involving workforce development, pathways out of poverty, economic impact, labor market analysis, and research for economic development.
Most recently Sharon led UBRI’s partnership with The John R. Oishei’s Mobile Safety-Net Team focused on poverty and contributing factors, as well as strategies and models that reduce economic vulnerability. The work engaged 140+ providers and thousands of residents, and culminated in NumbersInNeed.org, an interactive online tool offering a variety of resources.
Sharon offers project leadership for UBRI’s partnership with Goodwill focused on a workforce development strategy that addresses ecosystem gaps. Sharon is also heading a two-phase economic impact study for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, quantifying baseline impacts and analyzing how impacts will grow as a result of the museum’s historic expansion project.
Other work that she is exceptionally proud of, because it tackles topics, data and/or impacts that are more difficult to capture, include Labor Market Assessment 2017, The Racial Equity Dividend: Buffalo’s Great Opportunity, How SUNY Matters-Economic Impacts of the State University of New York, and Pathways to Progress for Women and Girls of Western New York.
Sharon holds a juris doctor from the UB School of Law and a bachelor’s degree in both economics and microbiology from the University of Rochester. Prior to moving to Buffalo for grad school and joining UBRI in 2000 as a part-time policy associate, Sharon worked as an actuarial analyst at Cigna in Hartford, CT and interned for the NYS Human Rights Division and the EEOC. Outside of work, Sharon loves to sew and create unique things, take long walks on beaten urban trails, volunteer at church, spend time with her mystery kitty Miss Biden, and raise awareness and funding for ALS research from her book Sunny Skies From the Valley.