Jessica is the founder and director of the Center for Policy Research (CPR), a nonprofit research and evaluation firm established in 1981 to improve the lives of children and their families. She has conducted many evaluations of single and multi-site projects on child support policies and ways to engage low-income fathers and provide more holistic, family-oriented services. These have included studies of programs dealing with in-hospital paternity, access and visitation, employment, debt compromise, healthy relationships, asset building and re-entry for ex-offenders.

Jessica directed the eight-state evaluation of the Office of Child Support Enforcement Responsible Fatherhood Programs as well as ground-breaking research on mediation, parent education, supervised visitation and other interventions dealing with parenting time. Her many publications include “Co-parenting Interventions with Fragile Families,” (coauthored with James McHale and Maureen Waller), which appeared in Family Process (2012).