Kelly Hallman is a senior associate in the Poverty, Gender, and Youth program at the Population Council. An adolescent specialist focused on gender equality, Hallman focuses on how policies, programs, and practice affect young people according to their gender and socioeconomic status. She works with governments and community organizations in low- and middle-income countries to assess and strengthen health and education programs. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation whose childhood was marked by constant migration, Hallman is dedicated to the well-being of indigenous populations and combating the effects of social exclusion.

Hallman has made significant contributions to the fields of adolescent and indigenous health. In 2006, she co-authored a joint Population Council and UNFPA guide and toolkit, Investing When It Counts: Generating the Evidence Base for Policies and Programmes for Very Young Adolescents, which argued for the inclusion of 10-14-year-olds in adolescent programs. Her work on how the combination of gender, ethnicity, age, and residential status contribute to rates of school attendance, child marriage, and early pregnancy among indigenous Guatemalan girls is documented in Exclusion, Gender and Schooling: Case Studies from the Developing World.

Hallman's work on how social inclusion affects the HIV risk behavior of boys compared to girls is outlined in "Social exclusion: The gendering of adolescent HIV risks in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa," a chapter from the UNESCO volume Fourth Wave: An Assault on Women-Gender, Culture and HIV in the 21st Century.

Before joining the Council Hallman completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the International Food Policy Research Institute, working on a large USAID-funded, multi-country project exploring the role of gender in household food and nutrition security.

Hallman serves as a reviewer and advisor for numerous panels and studies. She is a member of the advisory board of UNICEF's "Social Norms and Community-based Care Programming in Humanitarian Settings: Building 'Good Practice' Approaches for Response to and Primary Prevention of Sexual Violence against Women and Girls Affected by Conflict" and on the Population Council's Institutional Review Board.

Hallman holds an MA and a PhD in economics from Michigan State University.