Born in Romania, P. Cristian Gugiu immigrated to the United States at the age of seven. Growing up in New York City has taught Cristian a profound appreciation for cultural diversity, which he brings into his studies and evaluation practice. He has earned an undergraduate and graduate degree in psychology from the universities of Michigan and Illinois, respectively.

Currently, he is a fourth-year graduate student at Western Michigan University (WMU), pursuing a doctoral degree in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Evaluation program. He selected the IDPE program because it offers the best graduate training in evaluation in the nation, and arguably the world.

Cristian works at the WMU Graduate Center for Research and Retention. He comes to the Center with over ten years of evaluation experience during which he worked on numerous national evaluation projects, including (a) Technical Assistance on Evaluation to Adoption Opportunities and Child Abuse and Neglect Grantees, (b) Performance of States in Achieving the Child Welfare Outcome Measures, (c) HIV/AIDS Treatment Adherence, Health Outcomes, and Cost Study, (d) National Evaluation of the Regional Primate Research Centers, and (e) Welfare to Work program. For the past two years, he has co-led an international evaluation of a community college located in the Caribbean with fellow classmate, Nadini Persaud. Even more impressive is the fact that he and Nadini have donated over two thousand hours of their time to complete this project.

Cristian and two classmates, Brandon Youker and Nadini Persaud, were invited by the American Evaluation Association to give a premier panel presentation on the Value-Driven Evaluation approach in November 2006.

a photo of Cristian Gugiu, Brandon Youker and Nadini Persaud
Gugiu, Youker and Persaud.

This presentation, which was organized by Cristian, will highlight the necessity of including pertinent values in determining the merit, worth, and meaningful significance of the entity that is evaluated, e.g., program, policy, etc. This presentation will be of particular relevance to evaluators because it will address four questions of significant relevance to the field: What are the differences between research and evaluation? Why are these differences important? How can values and standards be used to formulate evaluative statements? How can multiple evaluative statements be synthesized into a summative conclusion?

Cristian’s dream is to become a faculty member at a university where he can teach on the subjects of evaluation and methodology. He also hopes to influence the field of evaluation through his dissertation, in which he has developed a novel methodology for determining the quality of evaluation conclusions. This approach, which he has named Summative Confidence, is a mathematical algorithm that allows one to calculate the amount of confidence that can be placed on a summative conclusion that was formulated using a multi-method approach. Considering the billions of dollars that are invested in evaluation each year, some of which are used to support evaluations of poor quality, he hopes that he will be successful in convincing other evaluators to adopt his methodology for determining the quality of their evaluation conclusions.

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