About Me
Leader. Developer. Evaluator.
I am passionate about helping organizations and communities thrive. An essential aspect of creating positive and sustainable changes in organizations and communities is quality evaluation. I use evaluation methods to inform decision makers, stakeholders, and scholars how to solve complex issues.
U.S. Government Accountability Office Portfolio
Sample of performance audits where I made key contributions
U.S. Customs and Border Protection invests billions of dollars each year on systems to support its missions. But CBP's purchases have frequently cost more and taken longer to arrive than expected.
We looked at 10 CBP acquisition programs and found that they didn't consistently collect or share lessons learned from past projects. CBP should also improve its acquisition guidance for contracting officers and program officials.
Hypersonic weapons fly at least 5 times the speed of sound, have unpredictable flight paths, and are expected to be very difficult to defend against.
The Department of Defense is developing hypersonic weapons and technologies with support from other agencies. These projects are expected to cost almost $15 billion from FYs 2015-2024. To ensure coordinated leadership, we recommended that DOD better define and document roles and responsibilities for these efforts.
The Program Management Improvement Accountability Act of 2016 requires the Office of Management and Budget to develop government-wide standards for program management.
We found that OMB has begun to do so, but further efforts are needed to fully implement this act. We made 8 recommendations to OMB, including that the agency develop a governance structure for program management standards.
The Department of Agriculture's National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program give schools billions of dollars every year to provide meals for children. Historically, the rates of estimated payment errors have been high, suggesting that the programs may be vulnerable to fraud.
We recommended regularly assessing fraud risks.
Published Work
See my 5 scholarly peer-reviewed publications on community development at Google Scholar
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See my data-driven management work on GitHub
Professional Skills
Leadership
Leadership Style
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Collaborative
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Unifier
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Putting vision into practice
Leadership roles
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Lead teams (up to 15)
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Manage teams and projects in cross-cultural and remote settings
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Produce team generated research
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Direct community outreach
Teacher / Trainer
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Trainer in community outreach and public relations
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Former instructor for sociology introduction course at #6 Best Value university in US
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Former trainer and facilitator for conflict management
Analytical Software
Intermediary
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Stata
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R​
Basic
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ArcGIS
Research Methods Skills
Evaluation methods, systematic approach
Quantitative
Quasi-experimental methods​
OLS regression
Survey creation
Survey data collection
Qualitative​
Interviews​
Focus groups
Field observation
Mixed methods​
Sample Projects
Research and Presentations
This project sets out to show how spatial analysis can provide better understanding of nonprofit service areas in metropolitan areas of the United States. IRS data on nonprofit organizations and census tract information from the U.S. census is combined to explore the environmental effects on where nonprofit organizations locate and how the presence of nonprofits is related to poverty. The hope is that this project will provide nonprofit researchers with relevant data to further the understanding of how nonprofits help areas in poverty in the U.S. In addition, this project may also act as a tutorial, providing beginners to R with many techniques which may be applied in other settings.
Recommendations for rural health networks performance from inter-organizational network research.
This course project evaluated the two-way digital engagement efforts of a nonprofit organization in the Seattle, WA area.
The effect of client participation on the relationship between government funding and financial transparency in nonprofit organizations remains understudied, even though more and more resources are devolved from the state to third-party actors, like nonprofits, to provide public services. This research proposes an integrated model on participation and financial transparency in nonprofits and tests the model empirically. It provides a foundation for further research on the effects of financial transparency in nonprofit organizations.