IPE TIG Leadership Bios
January O'Connor - Chair
January O’Connor currently lives in Anchorage, Alaska. She is a Founding Director of Raven’s Group LLC, a consulting group that provides services in program planning and design, grant writing, education and youth programming, and evaluation for educational programs that focus on Rural and Alaska Native youth and students. January is Tlingit and is Alaskan born and was raised in Kake, Alaska. She possesses an MA in the Arts of Teaching from the University of Southeast and a BA in Psychology from Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
January has 15 years’ experience leading and developing youth programming that is culturally responsive and based on positive youth development guided by research. In her previous positions, she has worked with a wide-cross section of rural and Alaska Native people and has traveled extensively across rural Alaska. In her previous positions she assisted in directing programs which served to address educational and cultural issues specific to rural and Alaska Native high school students graduating school on time and their subsequent matriculation into vocational, educational, or employment pursuits.
January is currently studying for her PhD In Indigenous Studies. The focus of January’s studies is on Indigenous evaluation. Her secondary research passion and interest is indigenized education in secondary and post-secondary environments.
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Gladys Rowe - Co-Chair
Dr. Gladys Rowe is a Muskego Inniniw (Swampy Cree) person who also holds relations with ancestors from Ireland, England, Norway, and Ukraine. She is a member of Fox Lake Cree Nation in Northern Manitoba. She currently resides on the occupied lands of the Duwamish and Suquamish peoples in Washington State with her family. Gladys is a Scholar, Filmmaker, Poet, Author, Facilitator, Researcher, and Evaluator. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to her work and loves to think inside the circle when it comes to transforming the futures we are living into.
Gladys’ education includes a BSW Indigenous specialization from the University of Victoria, MSW and an Interdisciplinary PhD from the University of Manitoba. She has been working in the ecosystem of Indigenous and community driven research and evaluation since 2008. In 2020 she began her independent consulting work, and has recently founded Indigenous Insights LLC.
Gladys is the host of Indigenous Insights: An Evaluation Podcast.
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Alex Jauregui-Dusseau - Program Chair
Alex Staten (Jauregui-Dusseau) is an Evaluation Specialist at the Center for Community Engaged Evaluation in the UAMS Office of Community Health and Research. She is a proud member of the Navajo Nation. She holds a doctorate degree in Health Science with a concentration in global health from A.T. Still University and has 8 years of health care experience. Alex is involved in evaluation of community programs and execution of internal and external evaluation projects. It is Alex’s career goal to improve access to health services and reduce health disparities through a team-based and culturally informed approach.
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Melanie Nadeau - Program Co-Chair
Melanie has lived and worked in tribal communities throughout her entire life. Being an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in Belcourt, ND, she has a personal interest in research, evaluation and community driven solutions because of the many health problems that are not only faced by members of her family but also the community at large in which she is from. Currently, she serves as Graduate Program Director and Assistant Professor for the Indigenous Health Department/Indigenous Health PhD program at the University of North Dakota, and her current research is focused on working with her tribe to develop and administer a community informed survey that will assess youth protective factors and risk factors that lead to cancer over the lifespan. Tribal stakeholders have informed the development of the key informant and focus group process that will be carried out with American Indian youth and American Indian adults who work with youth. These discussions, along with findings from her publication “Identification of Cancer Related Risk and Protective Factors for American Indian Youth: A Mixed Studies Review” will inform the creation of a data collection tool that will be administered to American Indian youth utilizing a community driven recruitment approach. Throughout Melanie’s career, she has been given many opportunities to work with tribal communities conducting community based-participatory research, indigenous evaluation and case-control studies. As previous operational director and assistant professor in practice at the American Indian Public Health Resource Center, she led a team that successfully engaged a multitude of tribal health stakeholders from tribes across the region using a four-pronged approach to public health that included addressing issues through a public health policy, research, education and services lens.
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Jeremy Braithwaite - Communications Chair
Jeremy is the co-owner and co-founder of EvaluACT, a small research and evaluation consulting business in the greater Los Angeles area that is committed to serving Tribal Nations and Tribal organizations across Turtle Island and beyond. Their primary mission is to be a humble and responsible ally to Indigenous partners and relatives through responsive, collaborative, and decolonized scholarship and capacity-building. A few of EvaluACT's partners and collaborators include Bowman Performance Consulting, American Indian College Fund, NDN Collective, the Center at Sierra Health Foundation, Indian Health Council, Cancer Support Community, and the Wisconsin Department of Justice. Jeremy has also been employed for the past five years as a Tribal Research Specialist at the Tribal Law and Policy Institute, where he served as a Principal Investigator on multiple National Institute of Justice (NIJ) research grants with the Hoopa Valley Tribe of Northern California and the Northwest Indian Community Development Center in Bemidji, MN. Jeremy previously served as an evaluation lead on a National Quality Improvement Center initiative funded by the Children’s Bureau, called the Center for Native Child and Family Resilience.
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Katie Winters - Secretary
Katie Winters is a white ally living in Portland, Oregon, the ancestral homelands of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the banks of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. Having practiced evaluation since 2003, her current professional home is with Insight for Action where she’s a Principal Consultant. She is also a collaborator and co-author with InSites and an Associate with Bounce Beyond. She holds a PhD in Social Research from Portland State University, a Masters in Evaluation from Claremont Graduate University, and a BA in Psychology and English from the University of Colorado.
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Nicole Bowman, Ph.D. - Policy Chair
Nicole Bowman/ Waapalaneexkweew (Lunaape/Mohican), Ph.D., is a traditional Ndulunaapeewi Kwe (Lunaape woman) and an evaluation innovator whose academic lodge sits at the intersection of traditional knowledge, Tribal sovereignty, and evaluation. She is the President of Bowman Performance Consulting and an Associate Scientist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Bowman is a subject matter expert in systems (Nation to Nation), culturally responsive, and indigenous research, policy, and evaluation. She is AEA’s 2018 Robert Ingle Service Award winner (first Indigenous awardee), on numerous global evaluation or educational journal review boards, the co-chair of AEA’s Indigenous Peoples in Evaluation TIG, and a Global Member of EvalIndigenous and AEA’s International Work Group.
Dr. Bowman's Bio
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Mark D. Parman - Elder Advisor
Mark is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He came to program evaluation from applied ecology. For 30 years he worked as a ranch management consultant in the northern plains. At one point in his career, he owned and operated the largest Angora goat ranch in Montana providing ecologically, economically and socially sound habitat manipulation.
In 2007 he was asked to provide program monitoring and evaluation of the Cherokee Nation’s Community Organization Training & Technical Assistance program. In 2008 that program was named one of the top 10 programs by the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
Mark continues to work for Cherokee community organizations within the Cherokee Tribal Jurisdictional Service Area as well as those Cherokee citizens who wish to form community organizations from Tacoma, WA to Tampa, FL.
Mark is proud to say; “TsiGoLiYiSGi”..."I am an evaluator."