Biography

Laura Leviton is Senior Advisor for Evaluation at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey, a position that the Foundation created for her to advise and consult on evaluations across its many initiatives and national programs. She has been with the foundation since 1999, overseeing more than 80 national and local evaluations. She was formerly a professor at two schools of public health, where she collaborated on the first randomized experiment on HIV prevention, and later on two large place-based randomized experiments on improving medical practices. She received the 1993 award from the American Psychological Association for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest. She has served on three Institute of Medicine committees: the committee to evaluate preparedness for terrorist attack (2001), the committee to assess the Hearing Loss Prevention Program of the National Institute on Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) (2006), and the committee to evaluate progress in preventing childhood obesity (2012). She was appointed by the Secretary of DHHS to the National Advisory Committee on HIV and STD Prevention of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Dr. Leviton was President of the American Evaluation Association in the year 2000 and has co-authored two books: Foundations of Program Evaluation and Confronting Public Health Risks. She is interested in all aspects of evaluation methodology and practice. She received her Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Kansas and postdoctoral training in research methodology and evaluation at Northwestern University.