Deadline: Thursday, June 4, 2026
The family and friends of Dr. George Julnes and the American Evaluation Association are pleased to offer the George Julnes Endowed Social Betterment Conference Award, an endowed award established to honor the life and legacy of Dr. George Julnes. George had a distinguished career in program evaluation and contributed outstanding service to AEA, including as Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Evaluation.
This award will be given annually to recognize one or more accepted multi-paper, panel, or demonstration proposals to be presented at the AEA annual conference. The award(s) will be given to benefit emerging evaluators to attend and present at the conference. Students and those who have entered the field of evaluation within the last 5 years are encouraged to apply for consideration. This year we anticipate issuing one to three awards to eligible applicants who meet the criteria below and best respond to the application prompts.
Submitted proposals and applications should be directly aligned with one or more of George’s areas of interest and with his aspirations for evaluation to support efforts to transition to a better world. Relevant areas include:
Application Process: To apply, you will be required to (1) submit an abstract for a relevant multi-paper, panel, or demonstration proposal in response to the AEA annual call for conference proposals and (2) complete the accompanying application. Note that you may have one or more co-authors but you must be the lead author/submitter to be eligible.
During the application process, you will be asked to share and respond to the following:
Review Criteria and Process
Submitted applications will be judged based on:
A review group of AEA colleagues with expertise relevant to the topics noted above will be constituted to review the applications submitted prior to the closing deadline for AEA conference proposals. Applications submitted after the posted deadline will not be considered. This review group will be composed of 5 to 7 members including representatives of AEA’s Topical Interest Groups, the AJE Advisory Board, and The International Working Group.
Questions? Please review the associated FAQ below for answers to several possible questions. If you have additional questions, please reach out to AEA Staff at info@eval.org for technical questions about the award and the application process. For substantive questions (such as about the fit of a topic or the questions above), please reach out to Sebastian Lemire at sebastiantlemire@gmail.com or Deb Rog at debrarog@comcast.net.
George Julnes was Professor of Public Administration at the University of New Mexico and Emeritus Professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Baltimore. While completing his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Hawaii, George realized that he wanted to know more about how to “make the world a better place.” So, he returned to school to earn MBA and MPP (public policy) degrees at the University of Michigan. These postdoctoral studies exposed him to the field of evaluation and the American Evaluation Association (AEA), which, in turn, led to many years of teaching public administration and psychology and serving AEA.
George served AEA in many roles, including as a board member of AEA, a member of its Evaluation Policy Task Force, a leader of topical interest groups (TIG), and Editor-in-Chief of the Association’s peer-reviewed journal American Journal of Evaluation (AJE). He co-authored Evaluation: An integrated framework for understanding, guiding, and improving policies and programs (2000) with Mel Mark & Gary Henry. He published in major evaluation journals (AJE, Evaluation, Evaluation Review, & New Direction for Evaluation, NDE). His last edited volume was the NDE issue “Evaluating Sustainability” (2019). He contributed as an evaluator and/or evaluation consultant for many government agencies, including the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, U.S. Dept. of Education, U.S. Social Security Administration, and the National Science Foundation. In 2015, he was honored with the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Evaluation Theory Award by the American Evaluation Association, and in 2020 was named Fellow of the International Academy of Evaluation.