Evaluation alumnae wins AEA Guttentag Award

Congratulations to Dr. Liliana Rodríguez, WMU alumnae of evaluation, measurement and research and board president of the American Evaluation Association, for receiving the AEA Marcia Guttentag Award. The award is presented to a promising new evaluator during the first five years after completion of his or her master's or doctoral degree and whose work is consistent with the AEA Guiding Principles for Evaluators.

"It is an honor to be recognized by as prestigious an organization as the American Evaluation Association for my accomplishments in the field," said Rodríguez, who earned her Ph.D. at WMU in 2002. "I came away from the experience with a heightened sense of purpose and dedication to my colleagues and my students."

Rodríguez, a native Venezuelan, is now a faculty member in the Department of Educational Measurement and Research at the University of South Florida. She is the author of the book Collaborative Evaluations: A Step-by-Step Model for the Evaluator, and her work history includes evaluations/metaevaluations in multi-national corporations and capacity-building projects in Latin America, the Philippines, and the United States.

A member of several professional associations, Rodriguez currently serves as the board of directors' chair at the Evaluation Capacity Development Group and as the program chair of the Collaboration, Participatory, and Empowerment Evaluation Topical Interest Group at the American Evaluation Association.

Rodríguez's expertise with leadership, metaevaluation, multi-cultural and collaborative evaluation capacity building, project management, organizational engineering, and training have been noted by her mentors and colleagues as her strongest professional contributions.

WMU's Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Evaluation program (IDPE) has been named as one of the top ten doctoral programs in Educational Evaluation and Research, according to the Academic Analytics Faculty Scholarly Productivity (FSP) Index, which includes faculty productivity factors such as publications (book and journal articles), citations to publications, research funding, and awards and honors.

Additional evaluation-related news and events can be found on The Evaluation Center's Web site.