Keynote and Panelists

Nicole “Nicky” Bowman, PhD (Lunaape/Mohican) or Waapalaneexkweew (Accompanied by the Four Eagles, Flying Eagle Woman) from the Lynx and Wolf Clans, carries out her evaluation and related work in service to others at the intersection of truth, spirituality, language and traditional knowledge, sovereignty, governance, and evaluation. Dr. Bowman is a rooted and active traditional Lenapexkwe (Lunaape/Mohican woman) who has been an active and authentically engaged Indigenous community member for over 40 years, nearly 30 of those years being in evaluation contexts of practice.  She works by, for, and with the traditional medicine that her Elders and spiritual teachers give to her within and across the field of evaluation. Dr. Bowman’s academic, professional, and personal life is guided by an elder/traditional advisory council of traditional teachers, culture and language Elders and teachers, and family and community members, which also guide her evaluation activities.  She has been an ethical, responsive, and responsible Indigenous evaluator for over three decades. As a “Vigil Auntie”, she uses her medicines and teachings to bridge capacities and build good relations among and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, organizations, and governments engaged in evaluation activities.  She is daughter, sister, wife, and also the Founder and President of Bowman Performance Consulting in Wisconsin, USA and an Associate Scientist and Evaluator through the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s WI Center for Education Research. She may be reached at nicky@bpcwi.com or nrbowmanfarr@wisc.edu virtually and in Shawano WI physically where she resides on the ancestral homelands of the Menominee Indian Nation of Wisconsin.

Dr. Monique Inez Liston is the Founder, Chief Strategist, and Joyful Militant at UBUNTU Research and Evaluation, established in 2017 to honor Black women's intellectual thought, leadership, and vision. Inspired by the Bantu term "Ubuntu," meaning "I am because we are," the organization fosters collective liberation and dignity, prioritizing Black women and femmes. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Dr. Liston is a proud Howard University alum (BA in Sociology) and holds an MPA from the University of Delaware. She completed her PhD at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee with a dissertation focused on evaluating programs serving Black men and boys. With over 15 years of experience in leadership, education, and public health, she excels as a facilitator, evaluator, and program designer. UBUNTU is a space for collaboration, transformation, and emergent strategies grounded in joy, resistance, and radical empathy. Recognized for its impact, UBUNTU has received accolades, including the Milwaukee Business Journal's 2022 Diversity in Business Award. Most recently, Dr. Liston was chosen as an honoree for Milwaukee Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 2025 class. 

Dr. Gregory Phillips II, PhD, MS (he/him) is a tenured Associate Professor in the Departments of Medical Social Sciences and Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University, and Director of the Evaluation, Data Integration, and Technical Assistance (EDIT) Program. He is an infectious diseases epidemiologist whose career spans over a decade of exploring the complex factors that disproportionately impact the health of minoritized individuals, particularly sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals. Dr. Phillips has served as PI or MPI on multiple NIH grants focused on SGM, including a RADx-UP project looking at the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on SGM and racial/ethnic minority youth and young adults, an R01 focused on improving measurement of sex, sexual orientation and gender identity, and two secondary data analysis R01s to explore the disparities in alcohol use and HIV risk between sexual minority and majority youth within the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS).  He is also a leader in the field of program evaluation: he led the development of the LGBTQ+ Evaluation framework, was a guest editor of a special issue of New Directions for Evaluation focused on LGBTQ+ Evaluation, and is the former Chair of the LGBTQ Topical Interest Group within the American Evaluation Association. Across all his work, he seeks to use community-led methods and approaches.

Estelle Raimondo is the Head of Methods at the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, where she advises and trains teams on a wide range of evaluation methodologies, spearheads innovations and leads the adoption of data science and AI for evaluation practice. With 15 years of experience in evaluation and evaluation research, she has been an instructor for the International Program for Development Evaluation Training (IPDET) since 2016. Her research has been published in several internationally peer-reviewed journals. Her first book is: Dealing with complexity in development evaluation: a practical approach (2015, with Michael Bamberger and Jos Vaessen). Estelle holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Evaluation Research from the George Washington University, a Masters in Economic Policy from Sciences Po Paris and a Masters in Economic and Political Development from Columbia University where she studied as a Fulbright scholar.

Zach Tilton is an evaluation specialist with The MERL Tech Initiative, where he supports practitioners and organizations in responsibly integrating artificial intelligence in their evaluation work and function. He is the Co-chair of the Sandbox working group in the Natural Language Processing Community of Practice. He is an outgoing member of the EvalYouth Management Group, where he has supported young and emerging evaluators worldwide. Zach’s field experience spans North and West Africa, South East Asia, and the Pacific, with over two years of development experience in rural communities. He is finishing a PhD in evaluation at Western Michigan University, and his research is focused on using AI for meta-evaluation.