Date: Sunday, April 5, 2026
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
We are Susana Morales and Corey Newhouse, and we have the great honor to serve as the Co-Chairs for the AEA Awards Working Group for 2026. This role aligns our values of collaboration, equity, and leadership development by uplifting and celebrating excellence in the evaluation field.
The AEA Awards recognize and celebrate excellence, innovation, and impact in evaluation practice, theory, and use. The awards honor distinguished evaluators all while fostering a sense of community and encouraging collaboration and knowledge-sharing across academia, nonprofits, government agencies, and philanthropic organizations.
The AEA Awards not only celebrate excellence, but also help shape the future of evaluation by promoting rigorous, ethical, and impactful practices. They reinforce the importance of using evaluation to drive meaningful social change, ultimately improving programs, policies, and communities.
The 2025 AEA Awardees illustrate the wide range of excellence in 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.
Leslie Goodyear is a Distinguished Scholar and Principal Evaluator at Education Development Center. 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’s publications have focused on improving evaluation practice, including Qualitative Inquiry in Evaluation 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. Dr. Watt is an advocate for participatory research, consistently engaging individuals with lived experience in the foster care system as research partners. She co-founded and co-directs Texas State Sociology SOAR, 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. 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; on awards committees three times; as program co-chair with Chip Reichardt for the 1992 Annual Conference; 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 and Director of the Center for Evaluation and Assessment. Tarek’s research focuses on developing new methods suited for real-world evaluations. 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.
Dr. Apollo M. Nkwake (PhD, CE) is the Global Lead-Senior Technical Advisor for Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning at Action Against Hunger USA. 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. 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.
Nominations for the 2026 AEA Awards are now open! Submit a brief Letter of Interest here by April 10, 2026. The Awards Committee will invite full applications in May 2026.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.