Advisory Board
Center Co-Directors
Dr. Kathryn Newcomer is a the Director of the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at the George Washington University where she is also the Co-Director of the Midge Smith Center for Evaluation Effectiveness, home of The Evaluators’ Institute (TEI), She teaches public and nonprofit, program evaluation, research design, and applied statistics. She routinely conducts research and training for federal and local government agencies and nonprofit organizations on performance measurement and program evaluation, and has designed and conducted evaluations for several U.S. federal agencies and dozens of nonprofit organizations.
Dr. Newcomer has published five books, Improving Government Performance (1989), The Handbook of Practical Program Evaluation (1994, 2nd edition 2004), Meeting the Challenges of Performance-Oriented Government (2002), Getting Results: A Guide for Federal Leaders and Managers (2005), Transformational Leadership: Leading Change in Public and Nonprofit Agencies, (June 2008), a volume of New Directions for Public Program Evaluation, Using Performance Measurement to Improve Public and Nonprofit Programs (1997), and numerous articles in journals including the Public Administration Review. She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, and currently serves on the Comptroller General’s Educators’ Advisory Panel. She served as President of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) for 2006-2007. She has received two Fulbright awards, one for Taiwan (1993) and one for Egypt (2001-04). She received the Elmer Staats Award for Achievements in Government Accountability, awarded by the National Capital Area Chapter of the American Society for Public Administration, May 8, 2008.. She has lectured on performance measurement and public program evaluation in Ukraine, Brazil, Egypt, Taiwan, and Colombia, Nicaragua, and the UK.
Dr. Newcomer earned a B.S. in education and an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Kansas, and her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Iowa.
Dr. Ann Doucette is the Director of The Evaluators' Institute (September 2008),Co-Director of of the Midge Smith Center for Evaluation Effectiveness, and a Research Professor at The George Washington University, Washington, DC. She has broad experience in the management, analysis, and evaluation of diverse intervention programs, the development of accountability and outcomes monitoring systems at individual and system levels; research methodology, data collection strategies, psychometric and measurement techniques, and applied statistical analysis, including both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Dr. Doucette has been a TEI faculty member since 2003, and teaches Applied Measurement for Evaluation and Creating "Actionable" Data for Complex Service Systems.
Dr. Doucette has worked with federal and state organizations, universities, community groups, public schools, commercial health plans, and foundations regarding evaluation management and design, analytic modeling, assessment, testing and measurement in the areas of health and behavioral health care, school reform (urban and minority education), social systems and social policy, juvenile justice, poverty and disparity, and conflict and cooperation models. Her expertise includes the development of performance and outcome measurement systems that target accountability, quality monitoring and outcomes for system and individual levels of intervention/care. Her work includes a specialized emphasis on measurement, which she considers fundamentally critical for evaluation practice, and a complex adaptive systems perspective. She has developed several assessment measurement approaches using Item Response Theory (IRT) to generate measures having greater precision using brief, less burdensome instrumentation, which have the potential to lead to computer-adaptive applications and real-time data usage.
Dr. Doucette has served on several technical advisory panels. Among these panels are: the American Psychological Association (APA) Taskforce on Pay-for-Performance, and the American Medical Association's Physicians Consortium for Quality Improvement, The Joint Commission; Hospital-based Inpatient Psychiatric Services (HBIPS) measures; National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) ADHD and substance abuse measures; and the Forum on Performance Measures for Behavioral Healthcare and Related Service Systems. She received her doctoral training at Columbia University.
Center Advisory Board
Jonathan D. Bruel
Jonathan Bruel is Executive Director of the IBM Center for The Business of Government and a Partner in IBM Global Business Services. The IBM Center for The Business of Government helps public sector executives improve the effectiveness of government with practical ideas and original thinking. The Center sponsors independent research by top minds in academe and the nonprofit sector, and creates opportunities for dialogue on a broad range of public management topics.
Formerly Senior Advisor to the Deputy Director for Management in the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President, Mr. Breul served as OMB's senior career executive with primary responsibility for government-wide general management policies. He helped develop the President's Management Agenda, was instrumental in establishing the President's Management Council, and championed efforts to integrate performance information with the budget process. He led the development and government-wide implementation of the Government Performance and Results Act. In addition to his OMB activities, he helped Senator John Glenn (D-Ohio) launch the Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act.
He also served for eight years as the U.S. delegate and elected vice chair of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) Public Management Committee.
Mr. Breul is an elected Fellow of the National Academy Public Administration (NAPA), and an adjunct Professor at Georgetown University's Graduate Public Policy Institute. He holds a Masters of Public Administration from Northeastern University, and a Bachelor of Arts from Colby College.
Thomas Chapel
Thomas Chapel is Chief Evaluation Officer in CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP). He oversees the evaluation of several Center-wide initiatives and serves as an expert resource for Center and CDC programs and partners on strategic planning, performance measurement, and program evaluation. Currently, he is overseeing the development and evaluation of the Center’s stimulus-funded efforts at the state and local levels, Communities Putting Prevention to Work, and the Center’s several integration and collaboration efforts at the state and partner level. In addition to overseeing these large cross-cutting projects, he serves as a resource for CDC programs and partners in strategic planning and program evaluation; building networks on evaluation and planning across CDC’s many programs; and providing a range of training and facilitation services in strategic planning and evaluation design. He is a frequent and well-known speaker and presenter on the topics of strategic planning and evaluation, presenting at many national conferences, meetings, and grantee conferences each year. He is a well-respected facilitator both within and outside of CDC; each year helping 20-30 organizations think through issues, choices, and plans in evaluation and/or strategic planning. He has authored several articles and contributed chapters to several edited volumes on evaluation, co-authored monographs in the New Directions in Evaluation series (Jossey-Bass) and the Oxford University Press' Evidence Based Practice Manual: Research and Outcome Measures in Health and Human Services. Before joining NCCDPHP, Mr. Chapel was CDC’s acting Chief Performance Officer and also served within the Office of the Director as a subject matter expert on planning and evaluation. Before coming to CDC in 2000, Mr. Chapel was Project Manager and, later, Vice-President of the Atlanta office of Macro International Inc., where he directed and managed more than 100 projects in program evaluation, strategic planning, and evaluation design for public and nonprofit organizations. He is active nationally and locally in the American Evaluation Association (AEA), serving currently as Past Chair of AEA's Membership Committee and convener for the AEA Local Affiliates Collaborative. Mr. Chapel holds a BA from Johns Hopkins University, an MA in public policy from the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and an MBA degree from the Carlson School of Management, both at the University of Minnesota.
Kathleen P. Enright
Kathleen Enright is President and CEO of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO). Understanding that grantmakers are successful only to the extent that their grantees achieve meaningful results, GEO promotes strategies and practices that contribute to grantee success. While with GEO, Kathleen (with the GEO Board of Directors) has developed a compelling vision and cohesive strategy for the organization, led GEO through a merger, supervised the development of a host of products and services and forged high-profile publishing and other partnerships.
Kathleen speaks and writes regularly on issues of nonprofit and grantmaker effectiveness at national and regional gatherings of executives and trustees. Publications include Investing in Leadership: Inspiration and Ideas from Philanthropy's Latest Frontier and Funding Effectiveness: Lessons in Building Nonprofit Capacity.
Previously, Kathleen served as the group director, marketing and communications for BoardSource, where she was responsible for developing and implementing an organization-wide marketing and communications strategy, building and maintaining a consistent and recognizable brand, supervising the promotion of all products and services, and building public awareness of the importance of strong nonprofit boards. Kathleen joined BoardSource as editorial manager, where she supervised the production of new publications and resources. She later became assistant director of communications, where she served as a primary media spokesperson, providing information and public comment to journalists on an array of nonprofit issues.
Prior to joining BoardSource, Kathleen was a project manager for the National Association of Development Organizations Research Foundation where she directed a Ford Foundation funded project to encourage collaboration between nonprofits and local governments.
Kathleen serves on the board of Fieldstone Alliance and the advisory board of The Center for Effective Philanthropy. She previously served on Independent Sector's Building Value Together Committee and the selection committee of the Washington Post Nonprofit Excellence Award. She holds a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master's degree in public administration from The George Washington University.
Harry Hatry
Harry Hatry is a Distinguished Fellow and Director of the Public Management Program for the Urban Institute. He has directed the Urban Institute's Public Management Program (and its predecessor, the State and Local Research Program) since the early 1970s. He has been a leader in developing and promulgating procedures for measuring the performance, especially the outcomes, of government and private nonprofit organizations. This work has included a focus on pressing for the increased, regular, use of surveys of citizens and trained observer rating procedures.
He has contributed to a number of the major national efforts to bring about a citizen/customer, results-oriented focus to service agencies and government at all three levels of government. These include the Governmental Accounting Standards Board's Service Efforts and Accomplishments Reporting initiative, the International City/County Management Association's work in providing annual comparisons of local government agency key performance indicators, the United Way movement's recent focus on outcome measurement for itself and its supported local nonprofit service organizations, and he even played a small role in the development of the federal Government Performance and Results Act of 1993.
His numerous publications over the years have introduced many public employees and students to the concepts and procedures of performance measurement and evaluation, including his early Practical Program Evaluation for State and Local Governments, How Effective Are Your Community Services: Procedures For Measuring Their Quality, and his recent Performance Measurement: Getting Results.
Rodney Hopson
Rodney Hopson is Hillman Distinguished Professor, Department of Educational Foundations and Leadership in the School of Education, and faculty member in the Center for Interpretive and Qualitative Research, Duquesne University. He received his Ph.D. from the Curry School of Education, University of Virginia and has done post-doctoral/sabbatical studies in the Faculty of Education, University of Namibia, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Centre of African Studies, Cambridge University.
Dr. Hopson’s research interests include ethnographic evaluation research, social politics and policies, foundations of education, and sociolinguistics. As a former Fulbright Scholar to Namibia, he writes and researches on educational language policy and social transformation in post-apartheid southern Africa and schooling and education in globalized societies.
In evaluation, Dr. Hopson has been part of leading efforts to contribute to examine issues of culture in the evaluation field. With funding support from W.K. Kellogg Foundation, National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, and other funding streams, in his former role as Director of the AEA Graduate Education Diversity Program, he raised more than $3 million to support graduate students of color in developing democratically-oriented evaluation and research approaches and practices in traditionally underserved U.S. communities. A recently co-edited book, The Role of Culture and Cultural Context in Evaluation: A Mandate for Inclusion, the Discovery of Truth and Understanding with Stafford Hood and Henry Frierson (Information Age: Greenwich, CT, 2005) provides insight about how the evaluation community attends to matters of culture and cultural context. Dr. Hopson has conducted workshops about cultural responsive evaluation at the AEA/CDC Summer Evaluation Institute, University of California Davis Tobacco Evaluation Center, Michigan Association for Evaluation, the Ohio Program Evaluator’s Group, and Claremont Graduate University. In addition to his work in cultural responsive evaluation, Hopson is currently involved in an in-depth study of the logic model use of NSF’s large scale, multi-year, multi-partner STEM education reform Math and Science Partnerships (MSPs) with Rosalie Torres and the study and application of program evaluation standards in preparation for the third edition of Program Evaluation Standards for the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation with Don Yarbrough, Lyn Shulha, and Flora Caruthers. Dr. Hopson is recipient of the Marcia Guttentag For Early Career Promise from the American Evaluation Association in 2000.
Nancy Kingsbury
Dr. Nancy Kingsbury is Managing Director of the Office of Applied Research and Methods. In October 2000, Dr. Kingsbury assumed the newly created position of Managing Director for Applied Research and Methods at the Government Accountability Office (formerly General Accounting Office), where she is responsible for managing GAO’s advanced analytic staff including economists, computer engineers, statisticians, social science analysts, program evaluation experts, and other scientific specialists. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Kingsbury was an Assistant Comptroller General responsible for GAO’s work on government wide management issues including human capital management and government business operations, tax policy and administration, justice and immigration issues, and financial institutions and markets. Dr. Kingsbury was appointed Director for Planning and Reporting in the General Government Division in July 1995 after serving as Director for Federal Human Resource Management Issues for two years. She has also served as GAO’s Director for Air Force Issues from 1988-1993, and Director for Foreign Economic Assistance Issues from 1986-1988.
Dr. Kingsbury came to GAO in 1984. Between 1979 and 1981, she served as the Director of Resource Management at the Peace Corps, where she was responsible for the agency’s personnel activities, budget, and administrative services. From 1972 to 1979, and later from 1981 to 1984, Dr. Kingsbury served in a variety of positions in the Office of Personnel Management (formerly Civil Service Commission), including participation on the team responsible for civil service reform in 1978 and evaluation of the Intergovernmental Personnel Act grant program.
Dr. Kingsbury holds a B.A. degree from the University of Miami (Florida), where she graduated summa cum laude with General Honors. She attended The John Hopkins University as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, where she received her M.A. and Ph.D. in experimental psychology and analytic methods in 1965 and 1968, respectively. She has served in a variety of offices in the American Evaluation Association and the American Society for Public Administration, and she is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA). Nancy was recently elected to the NAPA Board of Directors. In 2005, Dr. Kingsbury was awarded AEA’s Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Award for Evaluation in Government. Dr. Kingsbury is also an Adjunct Professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C, and appears regularly as a speaker in programs on GAO and leadership sponsored by The Brookings Institution and other organizations.
Dr. Michael Quinn Patton
Dr Michael Quinn Patton directs an organizational development and evaluation consulting business, "Utilization-Focused Evaluation." He has been an evaluation consultant for 30 years and has worked at local, state, national, and international levels. He has evaluated a wide variety of programs in areas as diverse as health, human services, education, cooperative extension, environment, agriculture, employment, training, leadership development, literacy, early childhood and parent education, poverty alleviation, economic development, and advocacy. He has consulted with non-profit, philanthropic, private sector, and international organizations. His consulting practice has included program evaluation, strategic planning, conflict resolution, board facilitation, staff development, futuring, and a variety of organizational development approaches.
He is author of five books on program evaluation including Utilization-Focused Evaluation: The New Century Text (Sage, 1997) and Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods (3rd edition, Sage, 2002). He is a former President of the American Evaluation Association (AEA); received the Alva and Gunner Myrdal Award from the Evaluation Research Society for "outstanding contributions to evaluation use and practice" and the Paul Lazarsfeld Award for lifetime contributions to evaluation theory from AEA. He has held many positions including Director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Social Research and received that University's Morse-Amoco Award for outstanding teaching. His latest book, with two Canadian colleagues, is Getting to Maybe: How the World Is Changed (Random House Canada, 2006).
Debra Rog
Debra Rog is Vice President of the Rockville Institute, an Associate Director at Westat, and President of the American Evaluation Association. Dr. Rog has extensive background in program evaluation research, having served as director or principal investigator for many studies addressing issues such as homelessness and housing, mental illness, child development, family violence, and living with HIV/AIDS. In AEA, Dr. Rog is serving a 3-year term, starting as President-elect in 2008. AEA is an international professional association of evaluators devoted to the application and exploration of program evaluation, personnel evaluation, technology, and many other forms of evaluation. The association has approximately 5,000 members representing the United States as well as more than 60 countries.
Dr. Rog has been a member of AEA since its inception in 1984 and of its two predecessor organizations—the Evaluation Research Society and the Evaluation Network. Dr. Rog has served in a number of capacities for AEA, including two terms as a Board member (1985-88; 1996-99), Local Arrangements Chair (1990), Annual Meeting Program Co-Chair (1996), and on several committees over the years (Board Orientation Committee, Awards Committee, and Membership Committee). She was honored early in her career with the Marcia Guttentag Award for her dissertation work on evaluability assessment.
Midge Smith
Dr. M. F. “Midge” Smith is an experienced evaluator with a notable record of publications; she has administrative experience at several levels within a university setting and thirteen years successfully directing The Evaluators’ Institute (TEI). She knows evaluation as a learner, as a teacher of academic and non-formal courses, and as a practitioner in many subjects (e.g. agriculture, education, and medical/health).
In 1996, Dr. Smith initiated the first TEI program, with a packed audience on the Johns Hopkins University campus in Baltimore. In 2004, Dr. Smith, with help of key advisors, defined a curriculum to establish the first Certificate Program for Professional Evaluators available entirely through off-campus intensive short courses. And, in 2005, she started discussions with TEI faculty, other evaluation leaders, and three institutions of higher education about the optimum environment and set up within which TEI could flourish and where program evaluation could reach a height of development and influence to effect positive change in the way public and nonprofit programs are understood and implemented. The Center for Evaluation Effectiveness at GW is the result of those discussions.
