Conference Goers Meet Leader of CGU’s New NYC Evaluation Center

Thousands gathered for this year’s American Evaluation Association Conference in Atlanta, which offered hundreds of sessions and development workshops on the science evaluation—and created an ideal venue for the Claremont Evaluation Center (CEC) to introduce participants to Deborah Rugg, who is leading the CEC’s efforts in New York City.

“The timing couldn’t have been better to share our programs and projects with everyone, and to introduce them to Deborah,” said Stewart Donaldson, former AEA president and Dean of CGU’s School of Social Sciences, Policy, and Evaluation and the School of Community and Global Health. “This is one of the top conferences in our field, and our team was so thrilled to have so much good news to report.”

Last month, Donaldson announced the selection of Rugg, whose 35-year evaluation career has taken her from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the United Nations Secretariat, as the executive director of the CEC’s new NY headquarters.

While this year’s AEA conference, which was held in Atlanta, Georgia, provided the CEC with a platform for introducing Rugg and bringing together Rugg, Donaldson and Donaldson’s successor as AEA president, John Gargani, who together envisioned a New York City-based evaluation center for CGU, the conference also provided plenty of other highlights as well, including:

• 18 Claremont Graduate University students gave presentations during this year’s conference; 11 of the university’s faculty members also led presentations or served as discussants.
• Donaldson himself presented at 8 conference sessions; CGU faculty members including Professor Michael Scriven, a co-founder of the growing field of evaluation and a world-renowned author on the subject, actively presented and facilitated several workshops.
• More than 50 alumni of the university attended a special reception held on behalf of the CEC and the San Francisco Bay Evaluators. A key theme of the event was the CEC’s expansion with the New York center as well as with The Evaluators’ Institute (TEI), which is based in Washington, D.C. and provides world-class evaluation training to both domestic and international evaluators.

“This conference is always a highlight of the academic year for our evaluation faculty, staff, students, and alumni,” Donaldson said. “It provides us with an opportunity to showcase many of the exciting evaluation projects going across our Claremont Evaluation Centers.”