From 2014 to 2023, Jeff was the executive vice president of research and oversaw NORC’s research related to criminal justice, economics, education, international development, public affairs, and collaborations with the University of Chicago and other academic partners." In 2023, Jeff became a senior advisor to the president at NORC. He has over 30 years of leadership experience at the department and corporate level, with proficiency in Federal and international procurement and contracts, strategic planning and program development, financial and project management, and subject matter expertise in housing and urban development, democracy and governance, monitoring and evaluation methods, and data collection. After his arrival at NORC as the inaugural head of the International Programs department in 2005, he led the development of NORC's portfolio of international work until 2020, which now includes more than 450 current and completed projects in more than 100 countries.

At NORC, Jeff has worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the World Bank, and the German Technical Cooperation Agency (GIZ). From 2013-2021, he led the NORC team providing global learning, evaluation, and research support to the Center for Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance at USAID, overseeing over 150 tasks (including over a dozen impact evaluations) across 50 countries. He served as NORC's Project Director on three impact evaluations of agricultural development programs- a food security program involving rice farmers in Burkina Faso and Sri Lanka, a capacity-building program for cotton farmers in six African countries, and a program promoting increased value-added for cashew growing and processing in five African countries. He has also completed evaluations for the World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group.

Prior to joining NORC, Jeff served for 12 years as the director of the Urban Institute’s International Activities Center, where he managed three major regional USAID contracts in the fields of local government, housing, and urban development in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He has published work on the development of policy think tanks, the institutional development of nonprofit organizations, housing privatization in Eastern Europe, and the linkages between urbanization and national economic development. As part of Urban Institute teams, he developed urban strategies USAID missions in Bolivia, Jamaica, Honduras, India, and the Caribbean, described and analyzed the urban sector with particular aspects emerging as key areas for USAID participation: in Bolivia, the informal sector; in Jamaica, land and shelter delivery; in Honduras, housing finance; in India, land development and delivery; and in the Caribbean, the relationships between urbanization, economic development, and the environment.