Lisa Aponte-Soto, PhD, MHA is the founding President/CEO of Tanoma Consulting LLC, a consulting firm providing transformative research, evaluation, and training services to advance health, education, and workforce equity. She specializes in asset-based community-driven models using mixed methods research and evaluation approaches. She facilitates capacity building workshops on culturally responsive practices, leadership, strategic visioning, and quality assurance for diverse organizations. Dr. Aponte-Soto is also an adjunct faculty member at the DePaul University College of Science and Health.
Dr. Aponte-Soto previously served as Associate Director of Community Engaged Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she managed a portfolio of community-based research and evaluation projects. She was also the former National Program Deputy Director of New Connections, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that provided research funding and professional development to historically underrepresented scholars. She led various initiatives in support of the career development of students and early career professionals including the U.S. Department of Education TRIO programs as well as STEM enrichment programs funded by NSF, NASA, and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Dr. Aponte-Soto served as a Board member-at-large for the American Evaluation Association from 2018-2021. She is an alumna of the sixth cohort of the Graduate Diversity Internship Program (Evolution) and a founding member and past chair of the Latinx Responsive Evaluation Discourse Topical Interest Group. She has served the AEA community through TIGs, task forces, working groups, and committees. She is also a faculty affiliate and researcher of the Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment Center (CREA) and member of the Advancing Collaborative Evaluation (ACE) Network.
Dr. Aponte-Soto earned her PhD in Community Health Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health and holds a Master of Health Administration and Policy from Governors State University. She received a Bachelor of Science in Biology and Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish Language, Literature, and Translation from Loyola University Chicago.