Patricia Rogers, PhD, is professor in Public Sector Evaluation and leader of the research program in Evidence-Based Policy and Practice in the Sustainable Health and Well-Being Research Institute at RMIT University (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), Australia. Rogers has undertaken evaluation and monitoring since the mid-1980s in government (federal, state, and local) and non-government organizations for a range of programs, including community capacity building, family support, criminal offenders, policing, chemical handling regulation, lab our market legislation, maternal and child health, agricultural research and extension, Indigenous housing, early childhood services, physical infrastructure, education, welfare and social change philanthropy. She is co-editor of a text on the challenges and opportunities in using program theory in evaluation in New Directions in Evaluation (Jossey-Bass, 1999). She has written on diverse topics including building evaluation capacity, using evaluation for improvement and organizational learning, accountability, project sustainability, appreciative inquiry, and cost-benefit analysis. Her most recent writing on program theory explores how it can be used effectively for evaluation and performance monitoring of complicated and complex interventions.
She has presented keynote addresses at conferences of the Australasian, Aotearoa/New Zealand, European, United Kingdom, South African and Swedish evaluation societies and associations and delivered evaluation workshops in the USA , the UK , Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia. Her work has been recognized by the American Evaluation Association’s Myrdal Award for Evaluation Practice, presented to an evaluation practitioner who has made a substantial and cumulative contribution to the professional practice of evaluation, and whose work brings to life the AEA’s Guiding Principles for Evaluation, the Australasian Evaluation Society’s Evaluation Training and Services Award for outstanding contributions to the profession of evaluation, the AES’ Caulley-Tulloch Prize for Pioneering Literature in Evaluation, and the AES Best Evaluation Study Award.