Date: Thursday, September 29, 2022
AEA Appoints New Editors of Flagship Publication
The American Evaluation Association has appointed Dr. Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead and Dr. Sarah Mason as the new Co-Editors in Chief of our publication, New Directions for Evaluation. We thank Dr. Leslie Fierro and Dr. Todd Franke for their years of dedicated service as Co-Editors of this publication, and for diligently working to maintain its standard of excellence.
In a joint statement, Drs. Mason and Montrosse-Moorhead shared, “We are honored to have been selected as the next Co-Editors-in-Chief of New Directions for Evaluation (NDE). Leslie Fierro and Todd Franke have done an amazing job at leading NDE the last several years, and we thank them for their leadership and service. To the AEA community, for now, we (Sarah and Bianca) wish to share the four principles that will center our work: (1) Diverse perspectives benefit NDE work and evaluation practice; (2) AEA members have an important perspective to share on NDE themes; (3) Authentic and meaningful inclusion of young and emerging evaluators advances our field; and (4) NDE work upholds and supports AEA’s mission, vision, values, and ends goals. We look forward to sharing more details about our vision for the journal in the coming months.”
Collectively, Dr. Montrosse-Moorhead and Dr. Mason bring different lenses to the Co-Editors-in-Chief role. Dr. Mason’s position is as an evaluation practitioner, directing The Center for Research Evaluation at The University of Mississippi, and Dr. Montrosse-Moorhead’s position is as an evaluation academic at The University of Connecticut, where she primarily teaches and mentors future evaluators and conducts research on evaluation studies. We view this as valuable because it means they bring a combination of theory and practice, as individuals and as a co-editorial team, which we contend will result in issues that are relevant to multiple audiences.
Individually, they are well-positioned to be Co-Editors-in-Chief. Dr. Montrosse-Moorhead meets all of the qualifications for this position. She has been an AEA member since 2001, significantly more than the 5 year minimum. She has a record of scholarly production. To date, she has published 20 articles, 1 edited book, 1 edited NDE issue, 2 book chapters, 2 peer-reviewed technical reports, 2 book reviews, and 1 R workbook. She has a record of evaluation practice and has secured over $15 million dollars in funding throughout her career. She has relevant experience in the editorial process as evidenced by serving as a reviewer for both American Journal of Evaluation (AJE) and NDE manuscripts submitted for publication, editing one NDE issue, and currently serving on the NDE editorial board. None of this work would have been possible without excellent managerial and organizational skills. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, she is committed to AEA’s values, and has experience putting those values into practice in her many prior voluntary positions within AEA (e.g., AEA Board Member, GEDI Evaluation Task Force Member, International Working Group Member).
Dr. Mason has been a member of AEA since 2012. She is published within and outside the evaluation field, and to date has published 7 peer-reviewed articles. She currently leads a portfolio of more than thirty evaluation projects that operate across the United States and internationally. Her current portfolio of projects is valued at over $5 million; Dr. Mason has secured over $8 million dollars in funding for evaluation projects throughout her career. She has also served as an internal evaluator at an Indigenous-led non-profit in rural/remote Australia, and as a result brings a practice-perspective that is informed by the importance of strong internal evaluation capacity, and the need for evaluators to understand and adapt to the contexts in which they work. Dr. Mason currently leads a team of 16 (12 full-time staff, four Graduate Assistants and one undergraduate student), running a soft-money evaluation center within a university context, a role that can only be fulfilled with strong managerial and organizational skills. Dr. Mason is committed to AEA’s values and to embedding them into her evaluation research and practice; she has worked to apply these values in reviewing for AJE and serving as current co-Chair of the AEA University Based Centers Topical Interest Group.
The American Evaluation Association looks forward to their leadership of this publication.