In partnership with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, AEA is launching the Ricardo Millett Award for Racial Equity in Evaluation. As Ricardo was a true pioneer in evaluation equity, diversity and inclusion, this award honors his legacy by recognizing an individual who is advancing racial equity in their own practices.
The Ricardo Millett Award for Racial Equity in Evaluation is established to honor the pioneering work and legacy of Ricardo Millett in evaluation equity and inclusion. This award recognizes individuals that have made significant contributions to advancing racial equity through innovative and impactful evaluation practices.
Through this Ricardo Millett Award, AEA is focused on supporting the inspiration of current and future generations of evaluators to pursue innovative, impactful, and community-centered evaluation practices that promote equity and social justice.
The recipient will be recognized at AEA's Annual Conference and awarded a cash prize of $5,000.
Melvin Hall is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Educational Psychology at Northern Arizona University. During a fifty-plus-year professional career in higher education, Dr. Hall has served in four successive appointments as an academic dean, most recently at Northern Arizona University (NAU). At NAU, Dr. Hall served as Dean of the College of Education and additionally was the principal investigator on two five-year US Office of Education GEAR UP grants providing dropout prevention programs and services to thousands of middle and high school students throughout Arizona.
Returning to full-time faculty life in 2002, Dr. Hall melded teaching and scholarship in Educational Psychology with engagement in funded programs and service to AEA. Over twenty-five years of active membership in AEA, he held leadership positions as Chair of the Diversity Committee, Board Member, Convenor of a national series of conversations on Race and Culture in America, and Co-Chair of the Membership Engagement, Leadership Development, and Diversity Task Force. In funded projects, he took on responsibility as co-principal investigator for five years of National Science Foundation support for the Relevance of Culture in Evaluation Institute. After the RCEI grants, Dr. Hall began a continuing appointment as an affiliate researcher in the newly created Center for Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA) at the University of Illinois.
As an external reviewer, Dr. Hall has served as a member of numerous review panels and the Committee of Visitors for the National Science Foundation EHR Division. In 2015, he accepted an appointment as an intermittent expert at NSF and in that capacity served as a program officer for the ADVANCE and HBCU UP Programs within the Human Resource Development Division of the EHR Directorate. From 2017 to 2020, he served as director of strategic initiatives within the NSF-funded Center for the Advancement of STEM Leadership (CASL), the first-of-its-kind research center devoted to enhancing the role of the nation’s HBCUs as they provide critical research contributions to support the broadening participation in STEM efforts of NSF.
In 2020, Dr. Hall retired from active professional life, retaining honorary appointments as Senior Scholar, American Association of Colleges and Universities and Distinguished Scholar, Marie Fielder Institute, Fielding Graduate University.
His work continues the legacy of Ricardo Millett by pushing the field toward educational opportunity and leadership development.
Dr. Nicole “Nicky” Bowman (Lunaape/Mohican), Waapalaneexkweew ("Accompanied by the Four Eagles, Flying Eagle Woman") of the Lynx and Wolf Clans, is a nationally and internationally recognized Indigenous evaluator whose leadership advances equity, sovereignty, and justice across systems. A traditional Lenapexkwe (Lunaape/Mohican woman), she has served Indigenous communities for nearly 40 years and worked as an Indigenous evaluator for over three decades. Her work braids Indigenous knowledge with scientific methods to support transformational evaluation, systems change, and sustainable, self-determined solutions.
Dr. Bowman is the founder and president of Bowman Performance Consulting (BPC) and Associate Scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s WI Center for Education Research. Dr. Bowman leads a diverse portfolio of multi-sector, multidisciplinary initiatives focused on Indigenous, culturally responsive, and equity-centered evaluation. Her work spans local, national, and global contexts—supporting federal, state, Tribal, nonprofit, for-profit, and philanthropic partners. As a strategic and compassionate learning partner, she provides technical assistance, training, and policy development to strengthen evaluation frameworks and metrics rooted in justice and community-defined success.
Dr. Bowman received the American Evaluation Association (AEA) Robert Ingle Service Award in 2018 as its youngest and first Indigenous recipient, the 2024 AEA Presidential Award for exemplifying the conference theme, and the 2025 Ricardo Millett Award for Racial Equity in Evaluation. Since 2010, she has held leadership roles with AEA, the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA), Indigenous Peoples in Evaluation, and EvalIndigenous. She also led the Indigenous Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) from 1999 to 2012. She is a Research Affiliate with CREA, a long-time member of AEA and nearly 10 of its state affiliates, and a member of the Canadian Evaluation Society (CES). She also serves as a Trustee of the International Evaluation Academy.
Dr. Bowman earned her PhD in Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis as an Academic Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2015), her M.Ed. from Lesley University (1997), and her B.A. in Education from St. Norbert College (1993). She resides in Lenapahoking (Wisconsin), Turtle Island (USA), with her family and the Mohican Nation and community.
Her work continues the legacy of Ricardo Millett by pushing the field toward greater inclusion, accountability, and equity in both process and impact.
About Ricardo Millett
Dr. Ricardo Millett focused his professional life on creating community in our field, and in so doing, shaped the careers of evaluators and practitioners of color who were often unseen or had not yet found their place in AEA or the broader field of evaluation. His life and work exemplify the goal of bringing newer and more experienced evaluators together, and we are humbled by the opportunity to share his legacy with a broad audience.