Profile

Sangeeta Tyagi is Senior Social Scientist at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Her work focuses on youth and community development with a focus on youth employment and education issues related to out-of-school/out-of-work youth. Her areas of interest and expertise include building youth employment strategies and systems for marginalized youth, designing cross-sector strategies to address youth unemployment, postsecondary education access and success for first-in-family youth, and youth engagement and leadership. She has a special interest in the organizational health and development, impact, scale, and sustainability of youth serving organizations and eco-systems.

She also serves as the founding President of the Board of the YouthBuild Charter School of California based in Los Angeles, CA and is an invited External member of the Institutional Review Board at MDRC, a research and evaluation organization based in New York City, NY.

Prior to joining Brandeis, Dr. Tyagi served as the President of YouthBuild USA, a national intermediary, where she oversaw the growth, quality, impact, innovative edge and sustainability of the YouthBuild network of 260 programs in the U.S. During her 14 years at YouthBuild USA she held multiple roles including, Director of Education, Vice President for Education and Career Development, Senior Vice President for Education, Chief Program Officer, and then President. She has also been a faculty member at Boston College, Roanoke College in Virginia, and at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.

She has a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brandeis University.