Ann Huff Stevens provided these opening remarks for the Center for Poverty Research 2013 conference The Affordable Care Act and Low Income Populations: Lessons from and Challenges for Research. This conference brought together a unique mix of researchers, policy professionals and industry leaders to discuss what the new law means for health care in this country, as well as its possible impacts on domestic poverty. Stevens is the Director of the Center for Poverty Research, and Professor of Economics at UC Davis. She has served as an investigator on several grants from the National Science Foundation, including a study currently underway to better understand the relationship between cyclical movements in unemployment and mortality. Stevens is also a faculty research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. Learn more at http://poverty.ucdavis.edu