Congratulations to the 2025 AEA Awards recipients for their achievements, dedication, and contributions to the field of evaluation!
Dr. Cherie Avent is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and faculty affiliate with the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on social justice-oriented communication and action, and their impact on change through evaluator and program practices with a primary area in STEM education evaluation. Dr. Avent’s values, intersectional identities, and lived experiences deeply shape her commitments to serving communities who are minoritized in society. Furthermore, she leverages her research to prepare graduate students to responsibly and skillfully work as culturally responsive and equity-focused program evaluators. Dr. Avent has served as the evaluator on numerous federally and locally funded projects. Currently, she serves on the editorial board of the American Journal of Evaluation as the Co-Section Editor for Book Reviews.
Leslie Goodyear has been a practicing evaluator and AEA member for 30 years. She is a Distinguished Scholar and Principal Evaluator at Education Development Center (EDC). Having worked in nonprofits, Leslie became an evaluator by accident but immediately knew she was going to love using evaluation to facilitate learning and improve programs. Since starting her evaluation practice in grad school, Leslie has led and collaborated on dozens of evaluations and evaluation capacity building initiatives, employing culturally responsive and values-engaged evaluation approaches. As a program officer at NSF, she commissioned evaluations and facilitated evaluation capacity building sessions. Over the years, Leslie has hosted and mentored 15 AEA GEDI scholars. She was the 2018 AEA President and was elected to the AEA board twice. She served as the Ethics Section editor and associate editor of the American Journal of Evaluation, chair of the Qualitative Methods TIG, and chair and member of AEA’s Ethics Working Group, contributing to the revision and dissemination of the AEA Guiding Principles. Leslie loves to collaborate, and her publications have focused on improving evaluation practice. Examples include Qualitative Inquiry in Evaluation (co-editor) and Evaluation capacity building in theory and practice: Revisiting models from practitioner perspectives.
Dr. Toni Watt serves as the Chair and Professor of Sociology at Texas State University. Throughout her career, Dr. Watt has dedicated herself to evaluating programs and policies designed to improve outcomes for children and youth who have experienced trauma and/or the foster care system. She has extensive experience as a contracted program evaluator and initiated numerous policy studies to ensure that evaluation data is available to inform legislative decisions. Dr. Watt is an advocate for participatory research, consistently engaging individuals with lived experience in the foster care system as research partners. Her scholarly work has been featured in academic journals, white papers, national and international media, and legislative testimony. In addition, Dr. Watt is committed to mentoring the next generation of evaluation researchers. She co-founded and co-directs the Texas State Sociology SOAR (Student Opportunities for Applied Research) program, which provides undergraduate students with opportunities to conduct applied research.
Sharon Rallis is Distinguished Professor of Education Policy and Reform, Emerita of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst where her teaching included courses in inquiry and program evaluation. As a practitioner, she has conducted evaluations of educational, medical, and social programs, and her research and evaluation work has taken her throughout the United States and the world, including Afghanistan, China, Palestine, Turkey, Canada, and the Caribbean. Sharon joined AEA in its initial year and has actively participated in many and various aspects of the organization, including: as an AEA Board member for two terms (1989-91 and 2001-03); on awards committees three times; as program co-chair with Chip Reichardt for the 1992 Annual Conference, which addressed the qualitative-quantitative debate and produced an NDE volume of that title; as President in 2005; and as Editor of AJE for five years.
Dr. Tarek Azzam, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Director of the Center for Evaluation and Assessment. Tarek’s research focuses on developing new methods suited for real-world evaluations. These methods attempt to address some of the logistical, political, and technical challenges that evaluators commonly face in practice. His work aims to improve the rigor and credibility of evaluations and increase its potential impact on programs and policies. His research on evaluation work involves studying the impact of politics on the evaluation process, and the integration of new technologies and resources to develop new evaluation-specific methodologies. Tarek has also been involved in multiple research and evaluation projects that have included the evaluation of student academic and retention programs at the K–12 and higher education levels, Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM) education programs, children’s health programs, and international schools and development programs.
Dr. Apollo M. Nkwake (PhD, CE) is the Global Lead-Senior Technical Advisor for Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning at Action Against Hunger USA. A recipient of AEA’s 2017 Marcia Guttentag Promising New Evaluator Award, his work focuses on improving program effectiveness through methodological rigor. He is the author of several seminal books, including the widely cited Credibility, Validity, and Assumptions in Program Evaluation Methodology and Working with Assumptions in International Development Program Evaluation (both available in 9 languages). Dr. Nkwake has held senior roles at The George Washington University and the World Agroforestry Center and has served as an Associate Editor for the American Journal of Evaluation.