Lori Wingate

Lori Wingate is the Executive Director of The Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University. She has a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary evaluation from WMU and 30 years of experience in the evaluation field. She has led a range of evaluation projects in STEM education, public health, and higher education. From 2008-20, Dr. Wingate was the principal investigator (PI) for EvaluATE, the evaluation hub for the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education program, and is now a co-PI on that project. She served as a subject matter expert in evaluation for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for a decade and has held two intergovernmental personnel act appointments at the CDC. Dr. Wingate has led more than 75 webinars and workshops on evaluation in various contexts, including CDC University and the American Evaluation Association’s Summer Evaluation Institute. With WMU’s vice president for research and innovation, Terri Goss Kinzy, she was a first-found finalist for the National Science Foundation’s Big Idea Machine 2026. She is an associate member of the graduate faculty at WMU and coauthor of the forthcoming fifth edition of Program Evaluation: Alternative Approaches and Practical Guidelines.