After graduating from UW with a MA in Sociology in May, 1992, Jill Jacobsen Ashman was accepted into the Sociology Ph.D. program at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. She received her Ph.D. in May 1998. Her dissertation research focused on the effect of timing of first birth on young adult outcomes for at-risk African American women. One of her major findings was that having a child between the ages of 18-22 was almost no different, in terms of negative outcomes a decade later, than having a child before age 18. Both groups had more negative outcomes at age 32 in terms of income, educational attainment, marital status, and health status than did women who postponed motherhood until their mid-twenties or later. In June, 1998, Jill started her career as a federal employee in the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). She spent 10 years at the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), working as a statistician for the HIV/AIDS Bureau. She was responsible for managing and operating the budget allocation formulas related to the funding and eligibility criteria for the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, a $2 Billion Federal Program. She was also the project manager for the HIV/AIDS Bureau (HAB) Data Support Contract, providing oversight of all work that was performed and facilitating communication between HAB task leaders and contractors. She wrote a few articles and gave or contributed to over 30 presentations at professional meetings around the country. Jill is now the Dissemination Team Leader for the Ambulatory and Hospital Care Statistics Branch in the Division of Health Care Statistics at CDC's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) DHHS/CDC/NCHS/DHCS/AHCSB-the federal government loves acronyms! This branch is responsible for several national surveys including the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS), the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS), and the National Hospital Discharge Survey (NHDS). Her team is in charge of producing public use files for these surveys, as well as writing reports and articles using these data and maintaining the website http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhcs.htm.