Collaborators

Thomaz was already a leading evaluator in Brazil when he joined the first cohort of the groundbreaking Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Evaluation at Western Michigan University. This is where we first started working together, while I was Director of the program and Associate Director of the internationally recognized Evaluation Center. Since then we have met up at the American Evaluation Association conference annually, run workshops together, and since 2016 have been collaborating on a number of projects, including two big ones currently.

Thomaz has over 20 years of experience as an evaluator and has conducted or managed evaluation work in more than 25 countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe and the US. His 45+ evaluation projects have spanned such diverse areas as systemic changes in the fashion industry, child sponsorship programmes, early childhood development and education, rural poverty reduction, children and adolescents’ rights, decent work agenda, among many others. Thomaz has a degree in dentistry from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, a Master of Public Health from the University of North Carolina, and a Ph.D. in evaluation from Western Michigan University. He has in-depth knowledge and experience in applying evaluation-specific methodology, including co-leading (with Dr. Michael Scriven) a series of impact evaluations of rural poverty reduction and environment protection initiatives in 21 countries.

Katrina was one of the very first people to introduce me to – and get me totally hooked on – evaluation. I was a new doctoral student at Claremont Graduate University and she was the brilliant TA for the theory-driven evaluation course that first captured my imagination and set me on course for the best career choice of my life. We became part of a close-knit circle of friends who studied and shared laughter through grad school and have kept in touch ever since.

One of the things I love about working with Katrina is how brilliantly she blends a truly impressive repertoire of deep expertise to find nuanced solutions to complex, multi-layered challenges. She’s my go-to expert when I’m looking for cutting-edge thinking at the intersections of culturally-responsive, social psychology-informed, mixed-method, theory-driven evaluation with deep insights into social justice and structural racism.

One highlight in the 24 years we have known each other was when Katrina came to my home country and totally rocked my kiwi colleagues with her brilliant keynote for the Aotearoa New Zealand Evaluation Association conference. Evaluation, she told us, is fundamentally about love. That revelation stays in my heart wherever I go.